Beautiful presentation and charming soundtrack, but limited strategic depth and lacking/dying multiplayer.
- Nice graphics, animations, and cinematics.
- Fitting music.
- Provides a low stress time sink.
- Victory points system offers multiple choices to conquest, warfare is not always necessary to win.
CONS
- Lack of interesting choices. A lot of complexity, but no little strategic depth in the gameplay mechanics.
- The game is not always logical. For example a 1000 pikemen can't take a wooden fortification, but 10 musketeers can. Most games have the usual rock paper scissor system, but you still can take out scissors with paper if you have a big enough of a swarm. But in the settlers 7 you can't use strategies like overwhelming the enemy with tons of basic units, you either have the right one for the task or you can't advance.
- Lacking interface, some vital information is harder to locate than it should. For example you will make a building and wait and wait and wait for it to complete, only to realize after 10 minutes that you don't have enough planks. Sometimes an industry will go to a halt or slow down considerably because you are lacking something, the only way to see this is to look at the icons on the buildings themselves, which unless you spend your time scrolling all over your empire you will miss. An empire can span over a dozen full screens, so it is hard to keep watch over everything all the time. And if you are waiting for 10 priests or traders to finish training so you can send them on a quest ASAP (because your opponent is racing for it also), you need to keep entering an exciting specific panels to check numbers as this information is not displayed in the main interface. Additionally getting a visual overview of your empire can be a difficult task since a lot of buildings look very similar at average zoom level. And if your empire has spread widely, then you will start scrolling madly looking for that church or stronghold you placed "over there, somewhere".
- Multiplayer is kind of an afterthought and suffers of many problems. In fact there are very few people to play with online and it is getting worse every day. (Not recommended to buy this for the multiplayer, unless you have friend with the game that are willing to play with you.)
- Ubisoft's abusive DRM.
REVIEW
The graphics in the settlers 7 are very nicely done, with beautiful cartoonish animations and cinematics and the music fits the theme. The game advertises its three different main paths, technology, trade, and warfare. The "path" you take defines what your main production will be. Technology is oddly enough done through religion as you will need to build churches and clerics for research, trade is all about making gold through producing special goods you can sell or exchange on the global map, and warfare is all about making the biggest army you can manage and crushing the opposition.
The main problem being its gameplay built around tedious complexity rather than true strategic depth.
The settlers 7 is about production, and its strategic depth is all about knowing the various prerequisites and getting them. It relies heavily on the "you need A to build B, for which you need C and D" kind of mechanics.
Even warfare suffers from this... example, to take one wooden fortification you need at least 10 musketeers, for which the bottleneck is the necessary 40 gold to make them, which needs mining the gold and making the coins, all of which takes 20 seconds to setup the production buildings and 20 minutes of sitting on your hands for enough gold to accumulate.
That is right, there is no time acceleration feature. If you need to mine 20 stones for your next key building, and it takes 10 minutes for them to mine then all you can do is wait. This is specially true at the start of every game, when you need to build everything from scratch.
Combat is reduced to selecting your army, and attacking an area.. the outcome of the battle depending entirely on having enough troops of the right kind to destroy the specific fortifications in place. In other words warfare has no strategic depth and is just another place where you check the prerequisites (what kind of fortification your enemy has) and try to get them.
In multiplayer this becomes especially annoying sometimes : you start by making pikemen to attack enemy troops, by the time you get enough of them the enemy made wooden fortifications, so your pikemen are now completely obsolete and you need to get musketeers... so you establish the industry and get the musketeers, just to find out that your enemy now has stone fortifications, again now your musketeers are completely useless and you need cannons, which take another 20 minutes to get, and so on.
Other problems with the multiplayer : No technology sharing between allies, no way to trade resources between allies, some victory points are much faster to get than others, meaning every game turns into a priest tech race and you rarely see warfare as it is easy to fortify and turtle but extremely difficult to make enough troops to take fortifications. I don't recommend buying this for the multiplayer, you will even have a hard time finding matches since it is so unpopular.
This leaves us with the story mode. A big chunk of the campain is designed as a tutorial. Most features are locked, and you discover them slowly as you advance. The story line is extremely generic, and you will guess most of what is going to happen from the first couple of cinematics. Let's just say the bad guys and warmongering allies are not exactly subtle in hiding their intentions or nature.
But all of this would have been ok, as long as the gameplay and the core mechanics were solid. But here again, even with minor experience in similar games, you will be underwhelmed. The missions range from being way too easy, to way too exhausting. The only difficulty in this game is to know that you need to build X and Y in order to unlock Z, which will in turn let you use Q and win. In other words the only challenge is to stay awake while all the different "required" buildings and resources finish building or piling up. Playing the settlers 7 is an exercise in endurance rather than cleverness.
CONCLUSION
The settlers 7 is an average game, it is neither bad nor very good. It does have beautiful visuals and music, and a complex economic system that offers some alternate build orders through the innovative victory points system. It is also a "feel good" game that provides a sufficient time sink, and it does feel satisfying to complete a map or mission.
However it also suffers from lack of true strategic depth which makes the game repetitive after a short while, and its limited multiplayer experience means the settlers 7 lacks the long term appeal of similar games. For this reason and for anyone but true fans of the series the $50 pricetag is a bit too much. Waiting for a significant sale or price drop is highly recommended.
Another big factor is the DRM system that requires a permanent Internet connection to play. This alone will discourage many from buying this title--with good reason. Skip this game if your Internet connection is anything but rock solid, and even then you will not be able to play it sometimes because the Ubisoft servers are "unavailable". Recently there has been a new problem also, players have been banned (!) from the game because they got repeatedly disconnected and reconnected, and the game servers interpreted this as playing multiple instances of the game at the same time. Buyers beware.
In the meantime there are much better alternatives on the market. Try Dawn of discovery (the Anno series in general) instead, a very similar game with much higher polish and more interesting gameplay. Or even Tropico 3, again much better and deeper mechanics if the humorous communism flavor doesn't bother you.