The settlers themselves are still delightfully cartoonish, but there's a real sense of hustle and bustle going on under your nose here, and occasionally I'd just zoom the camera right in with a flick of my mouse wheel to stare at the little men pushing planks of wood across perpetually whirring buzz saws, or follow the clutch of berry pickers foraging for tasty treats in the bushes.
As the new closed beta trailer above takes great pains to point out, The Settlers reboot benefits from beautifully detailed character animations as well as realistic settings and lighting effects, thanks in no small part to Ubisoft's Snowdrop engine - the same engine used to create The Division 2 and Ubisoft's upcoming Avatar game.
An odd choice, perhaps, given their rather lukewarm receptions back at the turn of the millennium, but as you can imagine, most of the upgrades come from the Office of Improved Visuals. Indeed, despite being a reboot of the series, creative director Christian Hagedorn told me that this new iteration of The Settlers was still very much inspired by The Settlers 3 and 4. First you'll need to mine the right materials, build a furnace to smelt that ore into ingots, and a blacksmith to hammer those ingots into individual weapon types. The same goes for building up your army for keeping enemies at bay. You'll need to do this while also making sure you've got dirt tracks or gravel pathways connecting these buildings to the central warehouse, and enough spare workers and residences to staff each place. As in The Settlers games of yore, if you want your blooming township to eat, you're going to have to build a farm to produce the wheat, a windmill to grind that wheat into flour, and then a bakery to pound said flour into delicious loaves of bread. The raw, beating production heart of The Settlers is very much intact. Here's how it's shaping up.įirst things first.
#GAMES LIKE THE SETTLERS PC FULL#
It's launching in full on March 17th, and I've been hands on with an early version of the upcoming closed beta build that will be running from January 20th-24th. It's had a slightly rocky road to launch, suffering several delays and refunded pre-orders after being postponed indefinitely back in 2020, but at long last this reboot of the classic city-building conquest-me-do is finally ready to beat down our door and come barrelling in. But this incarnation of The Settlers isn't so much about connecting to the series' past as it is about laying down foundations for the future.
#GAMES LIKE THE SETTLERS PC SERIES#
There have been some great building games that have risen up, and even developer Blue Byte (now Ubisoft Dusseldorf)'s own Anno series has staked a powerful claim to the city-building throne. It's been over a decade since a core game in The Settlers series last made landfall on PC, and during that time the real-time management landscape has arguably changed quite a bit.
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