The Settlers: New Allies Deluxe Edition

I went into The Settlers: New Allies with a colour-coded list of what the series historically does well: long production chains, careful resource routing, a slow economic snowball that eventually tips into military dominance. New Allies checks maybe half that list, and it does so with a deliberate redesign philosophy that the developers openly acknowledged came from scrapping an overcomplicated earlier build. What landed is a cleaner, faster, more combat-oriented loop, and whether that trade-off works for you will decide everything about your experience. The fundamentals are recognisable. You drop into a map as one of three factions, the Elari, the Maru, or the Jorn, each differentiated by building style and unit roster rather than meaningfully distinct economic models. You lay down a sawmill, a logging camp, a quarry, and start pushing roads outward to claim territory. The production chains exist but they are condensed compared to classic entries in the series. Post-launch updates have added buildings like a berry press for potions and a charcoal maker for coal, and the forester was reworked to free-planting, which nudges the economy toward more interesting decisions. A 1000-settler map also arrived as a later addition for players who want a bigger canvas. These are real improvements, but they do not close the gap entirely. The economy still bottoms out before it gets genuinely complex, and the AI opponents at standard difficulty do not push hard enough to force tight optimisation. The campaign runs across 13 missions following the Elari fleeing a military coup in their homeland. It is a functional story vehicle with voice-acted cutscenes, but the writing is thin and the characters leave no impression. The campaign is best treated as an extended tutorial that eases you into Skirmish, which is where the game actually lives. Skirmish lets you go head-to-head against human opponents via cross-platform multiplayer, or grind against the AI. There is also co-op play available for those who prefer collaborative sessions. The multiplayer has a modest but functional community, and the game even saw organised tournaments post-release, which says something about at least a small competitive scene forming around it. The presentation is genuinely excellent and worth calling out plainly: the maps are polished, ambient audio does real work (the harbour sounds alone are oddly calming), and watching your settlement fill with animated settlers going about their routines has the same pleasant quality the franchise always had. The trouble is that aesthetic warmth does not survive contact with the strategic layer for long. Combat is real-time with unit types ranging from melee to ranged archers, but army management is shallow and battles tend to resolve on resource volume rather than tactical decisions. The AI criticism from the community has merit. Low opponent difficulty and the absence of a map editor or free-for-all mode are genuine content gaps. Requiring a Ubisoft account login through Steam is also a friction point that clearly costs it community goodwill. For a complete newcomer to the genre who wants something approachable on a weekend, New Allies is not the disaster its review aggregate suggests. The tutorial is well-structured, the pacing is fast enough to avoid early-game drag, and the visual and audio polish make it a comfortable entry point. For anyone who played Settlers 3 or 4 extensively and is hoping for that depth rebuilt with modern production values, the disappointment is real and the community sentiment around that gap is accurate. Approach it as a light city-builder with PvP Skirmish as the main event rather than a full grand-strategy experience, set your expectations at that level, and there is a functional, attractive game sitting beneath the controversy.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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