With all these things happening at once, it seems like The Settlers would be a pretty busy game. The animations are pretty basic, but with everyone doing things simultaneously they don't need to be too complex. The people sprites are really basic, and there aren't very many of them, so the same villager is standing around the village. Many of the buildings look nearly identical, so players will probably find themselves turning on the building name option just to tell what's what. It does have some nice textures, and the environments are colorful, but everything having to do with the settlers themselves is mediocre, at best. It'd be more understandable for a game to take so long to load if it was a graphics powerhouse, but The Settlers isn't even close. Load times on handhelds are practically a death sentence anyway, but watching the progress slowly creep up, and having to stop the game to wait for it to save really kills any sort of pacing the game had. On top of that, the save and load times for The Settlers are unreasonably long. Immediately the game fences players in, forcing them to either play through one campaign or lose everything they've done so far. Gamers can play the title three different ways, but they can't switch between campaigns if they want to save. The game doesn't get much more exciting than this. For the DS version, three different single player gameplay styles are available: the Roman Campaign, the World Campaign and Freeplay Mode. It's somewhere between a real time strategy game, and a Sim title. Players take control of a settlement, and help the townspeople expand, erecting necessary buildings, finding resources and, as of recently, fighting off enemies. The Settlers, for those unfamiliar, is exactly what it sounds like. This is The Settlers, though! The series is practically classic and has a devoted fanbase, which makes it all the more painful to see it as a terrible bargain game that only one store even wants.

That's not to say that all Gamestop exclusives are bad games, though recent evidence would suggest otherwise. Blue Byte developed it, who should know exactly how to handle the franchise it created. The touch screen controls should work well with a real time strategy game. Looking at the facts, The Settlers seems like it should work.

Considering how bad this venture has turned out, this may be the last time Settlers tries to move beyond the keyboard and mouse. With the new Gamestop exclusive Nintendo DS iteration, this is the first time since Settlers 2 that the game has been on anything but the PC. It's seen some changes over the years but it's always essentially been the same Settlers game for all five (soon to be six) versions. The Settlers as a series has been around for over a decade.

Settlers 3 pc review