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The Settlers: New Allies review: a tedious blend of management sim and RTS that simply doesn’t workIt’s Anno from me
It’s Anno from me
The Settlers: New Allies - Developer’s UpdateWatch on YouTube
The Settlers: New Allies - Developer’s Update
Now, to be clear, New Allies is not aiming to be a successor to Anno 1800. They share some DNA, with both revolving heavily around production chains that take base resources and transform them into useful items via multiple processes. But Anno 1800 is a contiguous city-builder, where you take one pre-industrial settlement and grow it into a modern metropolis. New Allies takes that core idea and tries to squeeze it into anAge of Empiresmould, featuring a linear campaign and round-based skirmishes and multiplayer where you build a settlement, recruit an army, then use the latter to smash up your opponent’s former.
Yet this detail only exists at a surface level. Construction opportunities in New Allies are far slimmer than those seen in Anno 1800 or, indeed, previous Settlers games, and the production chains much simpler. Food, for example, is no longer a fundamental requirement for your Settlers. Instead, they subsist purely on good vibes. Food itself is an optional extra used to boost production rates of certain buildings. Water has been eliminated from the production of bread, while ranches now produce both meat and donkeys, rather than having separate production chains for each.
Once you’ve got your army, you then move it en-masse to your objective, which again is a slow process due to the speed at which armies move. When your troops finally encounter the enemy, they’ll engage in limp, perfunctory combat until one side is dead, and the other side is so decimated that it might as well be dead. Battles become a little more interesting once you unlock specialised units like shamans who are adept at destroying buildings, and many units come with an activatable ability that can help give you an edge in combat, (although fights will frequently be over before you can make meaningful use of them). But because every soldier is controlled individually, organising them into a coherent fighting force is extremely finicky. And since units auto-attack when they come into range of an enemy, it’s hard to stop battles turning into a big blob of mutual death.
Compared to, say,Company of Heroes 3, New Allies is incredibly basic as an RTS. Normally I’d consider this an unfair comparison because Settlers has always been more about societal simulation than combat simulation. But therein lies the problem. New Allies isn’t. Once you’ve laid the roads and constructed the buildings, there’s little else to do other than recruit units. There are no additional layers to the production chains, and no depth to the economic simulation. EvenAge of Empires, which is not exactly a complicated RTS, had the advancing civilizations gimmick to give players some meaningful sense of progression.
These problems exist at a fundamental level, meaning they occur regardless of whether you’re playing the campaign, single-player skirmishes, or multiplayer. But there are issues with each of these elements as well. The campaign does a decent job of creating interesting scenarios, but the core game loop is so flawed that they always devolve into a tedious trudge to the finish line. It also has a terrible story, one that takes the delicate topic of colonialism and feeds it through a script that has the tone of a TV show for pre-schoolers. You can almost see the actors holding the script in front of them as they read out their lines. Multiplayer and skirmishes, meanwhile, only let you choose which faction you want to play as, and how many players you want involved. You can’t select your map, or the type of objectives you want.
