The Settlers: New Allies

I came to New Allies as someone who mainly lives in shooters, but I track enough strategy adjacent territory to know when a game is punching below its weight. After several hours across campaign and skirmish, my read is pretty clear: Ubisoft Düsseldorf built a confident-looking facade and ran out of bricks halfway through the foundation. The setup is a hybrid RTS and city-builder set across a tropical archipelago. You pick one of three factions, Elari, Maru, or Jorn, each differentiated mainly by building aesthetics and a single unique unit rather than any deep asymmetric mechanic. From there you chain together sawmills, logging camps, quarries, mines (gold, gem, stone, iron, coal, all inexhaustible), a harbour, a toolmaker, a guild hall, and eventually a military pipeline. Resources move along roads via carriers, which is the Settlers DNA. The loop feels familiar for the first couple of hours. Then the ceiling arrives and it is very low. Combat units are basically three archetypes: a tanky defender, a high-damage attacker, and a ranged archer, plus a faction bonus unit and a healer. That is it. There is no meaningful unit counter system, no flanking depth, no upgrade path worth planning around. Battles come down to whoever built more bodies, which is not strategy, it is arithmetic. The campaign gives you a storyline about refugees searching for a new home, clocking somewhere around ten-plus hours with missions that funnel you toward military objectives regardless of the peaceful premise. The AI is a known weak point: community feedback consistently notes that AI opponents stop producing troops once you win the first engagement, which effectively turns solo skirmish into a building sim with a victory screen at the end. If you came here for a challenging single-player experience, that is a problem you will hit fast. Multiplayer is where the game has more genuine life, with matches scaling from around 30 minutes to multi-hour sessions depending on player count and pace. But PC Gamer and other outlets flagged multiplayer lag as a serious issue at launch, with settlers freezing in place and becoming unselectable during online skirmishes. Post-launch updates have added buildings like a berry press and charcoal maker, reworked the forester, and pushed the settler cap on larger maps to 1000, which shows some continued development intent. Whether the netcode has meaningfully improved is harder to confirm. The visuals are genuinely the game's strongest argument for existing. The environments are polished, the settler animations have charm, and the audio design from creaking harbours to ambient field chatter is well above average for the budget feel of the rest of the package. It is the kind of presentation that makes a bad first screenshot look like a good game. Critically though, the strategy layer is so simplified that veteran city-builder players will be frustrated and dedicated RTS players will find the combat underwhelming. The audience that lands comfortably in this game is the newcomer to the genre or someone who genuinely wants a low-stakes, relaxed session rather than a competitive one. That is a real audience, but it is a narrow one for a AAA price tag. Fred, Scout Team