Ubisoft Blue Byte, well known for titles like Far Cry 6 and Rainbow Six Siege, and Ubisoft Dusseldorf, who are working on titles like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Rainbow Six Siege, have teamed up to create this absolute masterpiece of a real-time strategy city building game, and they have not let us down with the attention to detail built into this title. This is one of those games you either love or hate, being that it’s a real-time strategy game where every move you make could influence something else. With the first Settlers game released back in 1993, it’s amazing to see how far this title has come over time with game mechanics and how it looks and feels.

The Settlers: New Allies features three different factions from the start; The Elari, the Maru, and the Jorn. Like all real-time strategy-building games, you start with a skeleton crew and need to build and gather resources in order to grow your settlement. You’ll need to build resource-gathering buildings to build more established buildings and build your army for when the enemy inevitably attacks you. You can gather things like wood, stone, and gold, and you’ll want to keep a constant stream of income if you want to stay in the game. The only thing about this game I could fault is the lack of a fast-forward button. I become impatient too easily and something like a 2x button makes the game that little bit quicker, but it didn’t take away from the overall enjoyment.

If you are chasing a story-driven approach to the game, perhaps something a little more relaxed with small breaks, then the Campaign has been designed just for you with 13 missions to experience. I can’t remember a game of this genre having such a great storyline to follow, and the campaign comes with prompts to help you out along the way, plus it was cool to zoom into those combat scenes when your soldiers are defending or attacking against another faction.

The campaign begins with you controlling a pre-existing settlement that has already been established. It is being overrun with enemies and you have been advised to jump on the boat and find new land to settle on. Whilst doing this first section of the campaign it teaches you certain things about the basic mechanics of the game so you are not thrown into the deep end.

The other game mode you can join in on is Skirmish. This is your go-to if you are chasing some quicker action, and you can either do online multiplayer or local. You can either play 1vs1, 2vs2, and 4vs4, with the latter ending in some complete and utter chaos. Growing up playing games like Age of Empires and Empire Earth lifted my spirits, and jumping into an online skirmish game, I somehow still ended up getting slapped, which was more upsetting.

If you want something more challenging there is “Harcore Mode” which like the name suggests is not for the faint-hearted. Everything is designed to be harder with the AI learning from what you are doing and using that to their advantage. I didn’t find trying to gather resources harder but they seemed to disappear quicker than it would in a normal skirmish or the campaign. Hardcore mode has three challenges which can sometimes be easier or sometimes near impossible, which I got more often than the easier ones. Depending on the map you select you can also make it harder again with the easiest being “The Shire” and the most difficult being “The Center” which is based on a star rating system one being the easier and three being the most difficult.

The choice of music in The Settlers: New Allies is fantastic, with an acoustic guitar playing in the background while you build your settlement, and the game goes a step further with the voice acting in the cutscenes, really helping to draw you into the story. The acoustic guitar is joined by the occasional wind instrument, and it helps to make the experience super relaxing, making it easy to spend some time just enjoying the game.

Like all games in this genre, when you click on certain characters in your settlement, they will give you some brief sentences that help to bring a level of immersion into the title. Whilst listening to the calming sound of the acoustic guitars, you can hear the waves crashing on the beach and the seagulls calling out, and again, it brings a level of realism into the game and it makes you forget what you’re actually doing.

There is a tutorial that explains all of the controls to you, but there are always prompts on the screen to open things like the building menu, or quick-selecting engineers to get more things built. The controls felt like they were well thought about and well optimized for the title, and you can glide around the map with ease and rotate the camera if you wanted a new or better perspective on something using the analog sticks.

The building is also simple; select the particular building you want with “A” and snap it to the hexagon you want to build on, and if you don’t like the default rotation of any of the buildings, or it does not fit the aesthetic of the building, you can also rotate them, so you can build your settlement exactly how you want.

The graphics were absolutely mesmerizing, with the cartoonish-feeling graphics you would see from titles like Overwatch, and every single color was bright and vibrant, keeping you “wow’d” the whole time. There is something about having bright and vibrant colors in a game to draw you further into it and helps you notice the smaller details, like how well the game has been textured and fine-tuned.

You have things like turtles and fish swimming around in the ocean, birds patrolling the skies, and a gorgeously detailed environment. Everything was just so well polished. You see trailers and images of games these days and question if they actually look like that in the end product, and Ubisoft did not disappoint in the slightest. The character models in the cutscenes looked absolutely stunning. The only thing I will comment on negatively with them is the eyes looked creepy as hell, they felt a little oversized for the character model.

If you love a game where you need to think about strategy and what buildings you place while making sure you have the resources to become unstoppable, then this game is designed for you. It has the perfect mix of audio, graphics, and gameplay to be something you spend an insane amount of time on, and who knows, they could add a global leaderboard in a future update, and you could become the greatest settlement around.

Written by: Hayden Nelson