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The Settlers: New Allies is the latest entry in the long-running city-builder franchise from publisher Ubisoft. The series has always been a cult-classic and this brand new entry arrives courtesy of Ubisoft Düsseldorf.
Previously under the Blue Byte umbrella, The Settlers series is renowned for its in-depth resource management and city-building mechanics. Over a decade since the previous mainline release, New Allies is a reboot that promises to bring the cult-classic to a modern audience.
This is not a surprising move in this era of remakes and reboots. As such, a lot of hype has been following the game since its announcement, even after delays due to negative feedback from players. So is the final product worthy of the Settlers legacy?
Welcome to a new world of possibilities in The Settlers: New Allies
As with previous entries in the franchise, The Settlers: New Allies operates on the premise of building a synergetic settlement from scratch by grinding for and gathering resources.
Players will establish a variety of buildings to jump-start the economy and command several units around the map to collect raw materials, turning them into handy tools and resources to be consumed. Additionally, they will also be encouraged to raise an army consisting of a lot of soldier units to help them conquer more territory.
Before we delve into further details, let's start with the basics. The Settlers: New Allies features both single-player and multiplayer modes. The former takes players through a linear story-driven campaign where they must complete objectives to progress.
The narrative puts them in the well-worn boots of a tribe called the Elari, who escape their homeland after a military coup arises. Traveling to new lands in search of re-establishing civilization, players will make new allies as well as foes.
The story progresses as the objectives are completed with brief interjections of voice-acted third-person cutscenes. Unfortunately, the campaign is fairly straightforward and not in a good way. The writing is pretty barebones with cliche characters devoid of any depth. Each of the 13 missions puts players in various scenarios, from uncovering new landmarks to helping out NPC allies.
Considering they have to start from scratch each time, it is hard to get engaged. This brings us to the gameplay.
Age of Settlers
Players start each mission with little more than a few engineers to help build and a warehouse to store goods - and perhaps soldiers too, if the scenario demands it.
The goal is to scour and claim territory in search of resources, the most fundamental of which are wood and stone. They can be obtained from forests and stone deposits respectively, but to harvest them, players must build associated buildings.
This includes Sawmills and Logging Camps for wood, and Quarries and Stone Mines for stones. Players will establish a building blueprint on a hexagonal, grid-based layout after which units will bring relevant resources to the construction point to begin the crafting process.
As gamers gather more resources, fresh buildings become available for use. These range from new houses to increase the population cap, to more advanced constructions like the Furnace or Harbor.
It is an easy-to-grasp loop of growth, and players will eventually move to more complex settlements as the means to do so become available - such as Coachmaker to enable donkey-pulled carts, Gem Mine to procure gems, and the Academy to enable research. Players have the freedom to design their settlements the way they want, which is always fun.
However, given the vastness of the map, many resources can be situated far apart from one another. This challenge must be overcome by building roads and faster means of transporting goods like pull-carts. There are various points of interest to check out too, like an abandoned mine that can periodically reward resources, so exploration is an important element of The Settlers: New Allies.
Often times, enemy forces can have their own settlements around the map, which players can even steal from if they have the forces to do so. This situation is made further complex by the existence of neutral NPCs as well who will attack both sides.
Since basic engineers cannot fight back, players must erect an army to help them pierce through any hostile fronts around the map. Of course, they have their own set of logistics when it comes to production, such as creating shields and bows at the Blacksmith to supply the units with arms.
Once a sufficiently sized army is at hand, players can send them around the map to battle foes. Combat occurs in real time as varied units clash against the foe, from closed quarters to ranged archers.
Gamers have their own selection of offensive, defensive, and support units to pick from, but so does the enemy. Be vary of enemy units including Towers, which willl attack any approaching opposition. Higher-tier units like Elementalists can make life easier by specializing in taking down enemy buildings, but they require rare resources to unlock, like gems.
What about multiplayer?
Multiplayer in The Settlers: New Allies is fundamentally the same as the campaign, except against other players or bots. They can pick between one of the three factions: Elari, Maru, and Jorn, each of which are also encountered in the campaign. While all function similarly, they do have differences in the form of different skills, passive buffs, and so on.
The multiplayer modes available in the game are as follows:
- PVP: Compete against other players to emerge victorious.
- Casual: Allows 1v1, 2v2, and 4v4 matches against other players or bots.
- Hardcore: Test your mettle in scenarios with unique challenging parameters.
Winning matches rewards players with XP as well as in-game currency. Overall, it is a simple game loop, but as they spend more time in the title, they will realize that there is not much to it. At least the challenges offer some varied scenarios to face off in, but they are limited in quantity.
Dumbed down into oblivion
To say that The Settlers: New Allies is a shallow game is an understatement. There are problems at every level here, from core gameplay to design problems. Let’s start with food. Players can establish various avenues for growing food, like fish, wheat, berries, meat, and bread.
The problem is that food is not a required factor in the core economy at all. Its sole purpose is to boost the production lines of other resources, like coal, iron ingots, and more. Otherwise, your warriors and commoners are perfectly happy to slave away without eating or drinking anything.
The game even manages to mess up the fundamentals of city-builders, with the lack of a fast-foward button. As fun as it is to watch citizens carry out work with their cute and detailed animations, the novelty can wear off quickly.
Eventually, players will be left sitting around twiddling their thumbs while it can take minutes on end to complete construction of a complex building. Talk about watching paint dry.
There is no way to pause production lines in The Settlers: New Allies either. Different buildings can demand the same type of resources, often putting a strain on supply. This further hurts the already super-slow-paced gameplay.
One of the more interesting aspects of the game is the Research Tree, which players eventually unlock via the Academy as they expand their settlement. It allows investing in additional perks that further enhance settlements, citizens, and military.
Unfortunately, this is lackluster too, with upgrades that don't feel particularly meaningful like increased building health. Perhaps this would be a useful perk in multiplayer, but feels redundant in campaign. In the end, the enemy units will never attack the player's territory, which is weird.
On that note, the opponent AI seems fairly simplistic as well, with enemy units often standing in one spot without any patrols or tactics. This means there is no sense of urgency as players can take their sweet time to ready up an army at their own pace.
On that note, it is not possible to replay completed missions either as it is a linear affair. Even the key highlight of the game, the combat, feels bland in execution as units auto-attack each other with at most one unique skill.
In the case of multiplayer, players cannot pick the map as it is randomly selected. With a variety of maps available to play on, it is baffling how such a standard feature has been glossed over. This is odd because players can toggle on or off certain maps from the Settings menu. There is no bot difficulty to select from either.
The funniest part about The Settlers: New Allies is its lack of consistency at times. Despite the fact that the Elari left their homes to avoid conflict, they sure don’t seem to have problems starting wars in uncharted lands and razing down other settlements. This is where the game's military focus falls apart.
At the end of the day, it is hard to ignore the fact that all these aspects of the game feel rushed or overlooked.
Miscellanious things to know about
If fans have not been sold on this game so far, then what's to come next will not change their minds. For one, The Settlers: New Allies is an online-only experience with live-service elements. As such, players will not be able to play offline, not even Skirmishes against bots. On top of that, it includes an in-game shop featuring microtransactions. There are two currencies: Shards and Credits.
As mentioned before, Shards can be earned by playing multiplayer matches or completing challenges. Credits, meanwhile, are only purchasable using real money. On that note, Credits can be used to not just buy everything that Shards allow to purchase, but also boosters that increase the earn rate of Shards for a set period of time. All cosmetic purchases can be equipped in the Loadout.
For a full-priced game, this will definitely sting some players, but it is to be expected of an online game in this day and age.
Graphics, performance, and sound
If there's one thing that The Settlers: New Allies is good at, it is the visuals. The game utilizies Ubisoft's proprietary Snowdrop game engine - the same technology behind titles like Tom Clancy's The Division 2 and Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope.
The game presents a cel-shaded aesthetic that pops with the use of a vibrant color palette. The swarm of units going about their jobs is also adequately animated. It is often a joy to watch the settlers harvest wheat and take it to the ranch to produce donkeys, or perhaps import gems brought by trading via the Harbor.
The sound aspect is equally excellent with calm, melodic tunes heralding the dawn of a new era of prosperity. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for voice acting during third-person cutscenes, which can often fall flat whether it is just two characters expressing surprise or arguing. The stiff animations do not help either. Thankfully, the technical side of things is mostly solid.
The Settlers: New Allies was reviewed on PC and its system requirements are surprisingly modest for a current-gen game. It means flawless performances across the board, so thumbs up for that.
However, I did have a couple of hard crashes to the desktop. Hopefully it will be fixed down the line. Too bad that no patch will be able to fix the bland, repetitive gameplay and the myriad of design problems.
In conclusion
It's a shame that The Settlers: New Allies is a mess on most fronts, even after a delayed launch on PC. Even if there is some enjoyment to be found in the simplistic gameplay loop, the half-baked and shallow nature of most of its elements eventually overshadow everything else. Every mission or session ends up inducing a sense of deja vu. Yes, its fundamentals are that basic.
This is made even worse by New Allies' penchant for wasting the players' time by omitting quality-of-life improvements that would be expected from a game of this caliber in 2023 - especially one that was set to be a revival of such a beloved RTS franchise.
Throw in baffling design choices around the board, and it is hard to fathom who this new Settlers experience is for. What is here doesn't just pale in comparison to other entries in the RTS genre, but also disappoints on most fronts as a city-builder.
As such, The Settlers: New Allies is hard to recommend to either newcomers or returning fans. Want to check out more RTS goodness? Take a look at our Company of Heroes 3 review here.
The Settlers: New Allies
Reviewed on: PC
Platform(s): PC (via Ubisoft Connect & Epic Games Store), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Amazon Luna
Developer(s): Ubisoft Düsseldorf
Publishers(s): Ubisoft
Release date: February 17, 2023 (PC) | March 23, 2023 (consoles)
