Top Secret Magazine Settlers III

Extremely popular in France the series Settlers from Blue Byte was always less appreciated here. For those which are not familiar with Settlers, the game is a mix between real time strategy and simulation much like Sim City (but medieval). All that can seem interesting at first sight but Settlers seems to have some difficulties achieving its goal.

The story behind Settlers III is rather original. Three of the more powerfull gods had too much fun for too long (Jupiter the Roman god, Horus the Egyptian god and Ch' ih-Yu a Chinese god) and to punish them of their constant festivity THE GOD (HE is never name) decide to give them a ultimatum. If they do not find among their people the character who is more respected and will carry out civilization towards a brillant future, IT will destroy the earth and will start over with new deities. Thus seeing their situation in danger, the three divinities prepare for war.

Each civilization is equivalent to a level of difficulty (a little like StarCraft), the Romans have an easy campaign, the Asian have an average campaign and the Egyptian campaign is most difficult.

In Settlers you do not have direct control over the population (except the military units). If for example, you build a sawmill, the woodcutters will go cut wood and will transform it into board all by themselves. It is also very important to control the most possible ground, each race have their territory and since you can only build on your territory its very important to increase as quickly as possible.

"A city in effervescence. "

"The three deities of Settlers III "

Each construction requires a certain amount of resources (wood, rocks, golds, etc...) and you have control on the number of resources which you want to give. The less you give, the slower things will advance but you'll have free resources for other operations. Therefore I hope that playing with the resource's indicators does not frighten you!

Settlers III is far from being perfect, the artificial intelligence is sometimes pathetic. The computer can have troops piled up at your borders but it does not cross them, therefore its easy for your archers to kill them. Your own troops have also tendency to go off and to try to conquer the world by themselves but they end up being kill. And since the game stresses more on resources management then war, perhaps certain players will be bored. Oh and there is no print instructions, everything is in HTML on your hard drive so its pretty hard to get information when your playing.

On a brither side Settlers III has very beautiful graphics and to see the small characters in action makes you very proud. Its also possible to play multi-players games on Internet for free. The game becomes more interesting since another human is much more interesting than the computer. But caution a game can last for several hours.

Wholesale Settlers III does not bring more to the genre than Settlers II but the fans of the series will surely like the game as the players who seek something deeper than just wage war.

Company :
Blue Byte
www.bluebyte.com

Category :
Real Time Strategy

NOTES:

Interest : 80 %
Control : 75 %
Graphics : 85 %
Sound : 79 %
Originality : 81 %

TOTAL : 80 %

Requirements

Operating System:
Windows 95/98

Processor:
Pentium 100MHz

Memory:
32 MB of RAM

Hard Drive:
200MB

Sound Card:
16-bit Windows compatible sound card

Video:
2MB SVGA video card

Simon Larouche
Aka: Valianor