REVIEW: ‘The Settlers: New Allies’ is a Reboot with Ups and Downs (PC)

The Settlers is an RTS city-builder series that has lain dormant for more than a decade after starting in 1993 by the German developer Blue Byte. With Blue Byte having been acquired by Ubisoft and The Settlers not having a new release since 2010, The Settlers: New Allies attempts to reboot the series with modern graphics and features while maintaining its original identity with three playable factions, a full single player campaign, and online play. 

Like most RTS titles, The Settlers sees players having to build up a city from humble origins. To do so, they have to construct buildings, explore for resources, build armies, and manage their population for maximum efficiency. Doing so allows players to build up their settlement to either complete specific objectives or destroy everything owned by an opposing force. 

There is a nearly linear progression when it comes to developing one’s settlement. Certain resources need to be found and harvested to build particular buildings to train better units and continue developing a city. This puts the onus of differing experiences on the shoulders of the map and objectives that players have to deal with in each game. 

The placement of resources on a map are one of the largest variables that players need to react to. Each map has different layouts of resources that push players to develop and their cities differently, especially as transporting resources effectively plays a massive role in building a city well. They frequently lead to players having to over-extend their city borders on top of finding the best way to carry iron and coal to a warehouse a quarter of the map away, which are engaging problems to consider and circumvent. 

Players also have to adapt to various objectives such as building up their population, fighting off attacks, conquering lands, or building up a stockpile of a particular resource. These work to push players to react as matches progress, but the more linear mechanics of city progression keep them from offering as much variety as they otherwise could. This can result in many games playing similarly to one another, especially if playing online against an opponent that does not engage very often. 

Objectives do have more variety in the offline campaign, but the mode is little more than an extended tutorial. The campaign follows one of the game’s factions as they flee to a new continent to escape a civil war devastating their home land. However, they find themselves embroiled in the new land’s own local conflicts and political turmoil. 

While the campaign has a solid foundation, it struggles to support itself in the long run. On a mechanical level, the campaign does not have enough variety to keep things interesting throughout its duration. Instead, its levels end up feeling highly repetitive as they ask players to repeat the same motions without reasons to explore or push themselves out of their comfort zone. 

The campaign in The Settlers: New Allies also suffers from some really awkward cutscenes and story moments. Most of the story is delivered through voice overs while playing, but especially important scenes are given cutscenes of a few characters standing and talking to one another. These scenes are where the story really suffers, as the voice acting is stilted, the writing clunky, and animation stiff. Scenes also frequently repeat themselves with characters rewording previous conversations and even hitting the same emotional notes that they did in the previous scene. These cutscenes are so lethargic that they make it difficult to take the story seriously at all. 

With the lack of interesting mechanics or narrative to keep players engaged with the campaign it is likely that players will instead spend most of their time in the online offerings. Players are able to face off against one another in teams of up to three players, or team up to go against AI opponents as well. These matches are won either by wiping out all enemies, or by reaching target goals for one’s population, stockpile of gems, and military power. 

Completing online matches also rewards players with experience to level up and unlock various cosmetics as well as a currency that can be used to purchase premium cosmetic options. Cosmetics can also be bought with a premium currency to avoid the grind, but the monetization is overall unobtrusive. However, at the time of writing the game is plagued by an issue that sees multiplayer games frequently not rewarding any experience, which is especially demoralizing when matches can take up to four hours. 

Overall, The Settlers: New Allies is a solid starting point to reboot the RTS franchise. While its campaign is dull enough to be ignored, the game’s bones are strong enough to support solidly entertaining online play. Despite its issues it has the potential to breathe new life into The Settlers as a franchise, which would be great for all RTS fans. 

The Settlers: New Allies is available now on Amazon Luna, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.