The campaign focuses on a group of Elari refugees from a military coup in their homeland, but the story is told with such hugely broad strokes that it never makes an impression. Writing and story have rarely been strengths in the genres that New Allies occupies, but there is simply a hole here where characters and identity should be.
There are key elements, though, which feel badly underdeveloped. It can be fun to gradually build up the infrastructure needed to mount a military campaign, but it does require patience – this is a slow, meditative game with large maps that take minutes for troops to cross. The only way that New Allies can hope to satisfy is as a fusion of these two poles – and it does, to some extent.
Viewed purely as an RTS, New Allies is a crude experience with simple units, overly dependent on tower defence and hobbled by extremely slow resource collection. Viewed purely as a city-builder, New Allies is an overly simplified stack of shortened supply chains, lashed to an unnecessary combat system. City-building and real-time strategy clearly share a good deal of DNA, but they have always made for a strange combination. It doesn’t take long, however, for those old design tensions to loom over the experience. New Allies has one of the most absorbing, fascinating depictions of economic activity that can be found.
CHAMPIONS OF ANTERIA REVIEWS SERIES
Ubisoft Düsseldorf – the current moniker of series creators Blue Byte – clearly revel in these details. Getting to grips with the economic systems, players can enjoy that great pleasure of city-building games – seeing hundreds of tiny people going about their daily tasks down below. The humdrum story serves as very basic connective tissue for the campaign. There are rolling hills populated by deer, azure lagoons in which turtles swim, and picturesque cliffsides circled by seabirds. Ubisoft Düsseldorf have crafted a genuinely beautiful world, an archipelago that teems with life. Sure enough, the 11-part tutorial and early missions make a positive impression. The fantasy setting has broadly medieval trappings but the tone is warm, bright, and upbeat. This plays out over a series of acts and puts players in control of three factions in turn – the Elari, the Maru, and the Jorn. The centrepiece of the game is its campaign.
New Allies is an often awkward mix of city-building and real-time strategy elements which will likely struggle to please fans of either camp. At launch, however, it has notable stability issues and again plays out the deep design tensions that have bedevilled the series for many years. This is an attractive, thoughtful game which is clearly the product of a lot of work. New Allies itself was announced almost five years ago, and since then has endured multiple delays and a badly-received beta.Įxtensively re-tooled, this fresh start for the venerable series has finally arrived – and with it, the scars of its troubled development. That period was marked with a number of failed attempts, including an action RPG shorn of the Settlers name and released as Champions of Anteria in 2016. This new entry in the German city-building series, which began in 1993, finally ends a 13-year hiatus. It has been a long, hard road for The Settlers: New Allies.
0 kommentar(er)
