The Settlers: Heritage of Kings

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	The Settlers: Heritage of Kings	CG rating 63 /100
	Developer: Ubisoft, Producer: Ubisoft Blue Byte System requirements: CPU 2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 3D Video Card with 64 MB, DirectX 9.0c compatible Game: The Settlers: Heritage of Kings Genre: Strategy

Posted by Assassin on 10-May-2005 07:47

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When Lord of the Realm 3 was released a year ago, I was shocked. True, the second iteration of the game wasn't extremely easy to pick up and play, but the way the producers over simplified the third Lord of the Realm, so that it would appeal to a bigger number of gamers, made me uninstall it after only a couple of hours of playtime. I wonder why Impressions Games didn't try and learn something from the evolution of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. For one, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 wasn't a game that you could master in just a few hours (remember "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master"?), but that didn't stop it from becoming one of the most loved and successful games in history. Also, even though Heroes of Might and Magic 4 was more or less a deviation from the classic HoMM recipe, it managed to attract new gamers to the series, while at the same time disappointing just a part of the established fan base. If you compare it to the other four games of the series, Settlers: Heritage of Kings (HoK) is a combination of the situations described above: some concepts were overly simplified, while new ones were introduced, enough to make the game very different from the previous titles of the series.
Therefore, if you loved Settlers 3 and 4, Heritage of Kings will probably be a letdown. And if you believe that Settlers 2 represents the height of the series, you're going to be very disappointed by Blue Byte's latest creation. But if HoK is your first contact with the Settlers series, you may come to like it, since it can be best described as a combination of Warcraft 3, Age of Mythology and Anno 1503, with a Settlers twist. Anno 1503 might be a good comparison to Heritage of Kings, since it too increased the importance of the military aspect in a largely economic series. Putting aside my nostalgic feelings for the first four titles of the Settlers series, I could have coped a lot better with the changes brought by Heritage of Kings, if the military and economic aspects would have been more balanced.

Regarding the economic part of the game, although at first you may tend to think that it has been improved (a lot of the buildings can now be upgraded, with five resource types to extract/mine - Stone, Wood, Clay, Iron, Sulphur and Gold), the fact is that many options that delighted veteran Settlers players are nowhere to be found. First of, the buildings are very large in size when compared to the geography of the levels, so it can be quite difficult to build an economy-effective base (I wouldn't recommend you to place the worker's houses too far away from their jobs, whether it's an iron mine or a blacksmith). On the other hand, all the resources now become instantly available after you mine/extract them, regardless of the distance between the mine/quarry and the headquarters or storehouse. Therefore, the sadistic pleasure from the last Settlers games of creating a clockwork economic ant mound is gone. In other words, building positioning is important only for the extraction of the raw materials, not their ulterior processing. Secondly, another questionable innovation is the unit cap, which is determined by how many village center you own. Questionable because although it forces you to explore and conquer neutral or enemy village centers, this expansion is just for military purposes, since the resources around your starting base are more than enough, so there's basically no need for an agressive economic expansion. On the other hand, it's highly recommended that you have as many combat units as possible, fact which further underlines the increased importance of the military in Heritage of Kings.