The raison d'etre of "Settlers" was to make building cities and armies fun and accessible when the series was thriving in the 90s. In an era when "Command & Conquer" was as ubiquitous as "COD" is today and "Age of Empires" was life itself, it made sense that cute characters living in chocolate-box cities would provide options for young and inexperienced strategy players. I was one of those players, building a Roman city in 1998's "The Settlers III" without the slightest knowledge of supply chains or damage statistics. It was a gateway to something harder and more thoughtful.

Unfortunately for "The Settlers: New Allies" in 2023, once you've walked through that doorway and spent time on something harder and more thoughtful, there's no going back. Thirteen years after its predecessor, "The Settlers," Ubisoft Blue Byte, a talented studio that has produced many of Hideaki Anno's games,

can't seem to find a way to blend cute aesthetics, paper-thin combat mechanics, and city building all in a modern context.

I have long lamented the lack of a fast forward button in this game. Considering that in previous "Pioneers" games, players were able to fast-forward time as they pleased, this is a puzzling omission, and perhaps the intent behind it is to force the sawmill to focus on the production chain rather than blundering along unaware that there is no lumber for days on end. If so, however, this is ill-designed.

Watching everything unfold at the pace of a tectonic plate instead of sharpening one's focus on the minutiae could only lead to festering resentment. The production chain from raw materials to units and items is supposed to be the best part of the game. It is a chance to carefully plan the placement of beautifully modeled buildings and to look charitably at each role in turning, for example, a block of stone into a hammer for an engineer. Or turn iron ore into iron ingots, which turn into axes for soldiers. As one digs deeper into the campaign and the settlements become more complex, here is the pleasure of constructing efficient small groups of buildings and watching people move resources back and forth between them in a well-trained manner.

Thus, when all is said and done, The Settlers: New Allies makes a compelling impression as a game for beginners in strategy and town building. There is something relaxing about the bright colors and string sections of the soundtrack. The way bridges are built over roads and houses are arranged in small terraces makes you want order and even taste in this cynical and chaotic world. It is wholesome. Friendly. Readable.

Six hours later, however, "easy to read" turned into "frustratingly shallow." When the town's logistical problems emerged, the root cause was almost always the loss of harvestable stone and timber in the quarries and sawmills. There is a clear solution to this, and that is to locate quarries and sawmills closer to the stone and wood. However, from the moment the warriors realized that the iron was gone to the moment they walked out of the barracks again, it seemed as if several eternies had passed. It's not so much a logistical conundrum to be solved; it's just a long-winded conundrum.

And that would be, well, acceptable if the RTS half of the game were deep and engrossing; even in the MS-DOS days, all it took to achieve military supremacy was to gather a horde of warriors and right-click an enemy tower. That has been proven to be the case here. Today, we can zoom in on the battlefield and observe each swing of the axe in detail, but it is hardly an all-out war. The health bar is dwindling, with little concern for flank angles, unit fatigue, or elevation advantage. While the tactical elements of combat only extend to the force structure of high health, low DPS Guardians, high DPS Warriors, ranged archers and arbalist units, still, simply having an overall numerical advantage is probably all the "tactics" needed to win most battles!

Technical aspects.

On the technical side, there is more bad news. The lag problem rages in multiplayer skirmishes, with settlers standing still or refusing to be selected altogether. In single-player, the game is smooth, but we had several instances of loading screens freezing or crashing to the desktop immediately after loading a save.

The campaign's surprisingly dialogue-heavy storyline doesn't help either. You travel through the islands of a beautiful tropical archipelago, fighting off bandits and searching for stolen treasures and artifacts, but as you do so, you repeatedly build settlements and only seem to click on the cut-scene icon above the base headquarters once you have achieved certain goals. Like the rest of the film, the characters and dialogue are endearingly naive and wholesome, like a European chocolate advertisement dubbed in English, but that's not enough to get you emotionally invested in the plight of the people.

A good RTS campaign should be like the original Starcraft II campaign, with each mission posing a very specific challenge. It should tear up the playbook and stroke your chin about how to cut through new environmental obstacles and resource constraints. There is not enough of that here. The scale of the operation you manage grows, but there is no freshness from one act to the next.

There are, however, very specific requirements to enjoy this game. From the picturesque pastoral scenes rendered by Ubisoft's Snowdrop engine to the utterly forgettable but nonetheless idyllic campaign plot, every inch of this game seems intended to relax and put you at ease. It's oddly peaceful for a game in which you can send scores of people to their doom or slaughter dozens of enemies.

It also has value for novices and young players of the genre. What may seem overly simplistic to one player may be an easy entry point for another.

The reason I am looking for positives so far may simply be that it is hard to kick a game that looks so serious and is so eager to be liked. I feel like I'm chasing away a goofy, misbehaving, but very cute puppy. Longtime "Pioneers" fans might prefer "Pioneers of Pagonia," being developed by Envision Entertainment, whose developers include the founders of the "Pioneers" games. But there is something here for the strategy-forward player who doesn't want to be bogged down by complicated mechanics or just needs a break from nostalgic armchair generals. If you have the patience.