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The Settlers: Rise Of An Empire (PC DVD) | 
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| From: Ubisoft
Category: Video Games
List Price: £29.99
Buy New: £11.98
You Save: £18.01 (60%)
New (3) Used (4) from £11.50
Rating:  11 reviews
Platform: Windows Xp
Genre: world-builder-strategy-games
Media: Video Game
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 3307210258427
ASIN: B000S8JO42
Release Date: September 28, 2007
Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Demo Tested September 15, 2007
Gareth Ritchie (Belfast, N.Ireland)
39 out of 45 found this review helpful
This is only from playing the demo.
Settlers 6 is a free-form, city-building game set in a fairly typical medieval setting. In a typical scenario or map, the player is given a map divided into several regions and their central settlement is placed here. The objective then revolves around expanding this settlement and capturing other sectors of the map for resources. This is a similar ideal to the earlier games, however die-hard fans may find the game a little restrictive.
The game looks terrific, sounds excellent (with some good voice acting) and is very enjoyable. At present there are a few features that are underdeveloped, however this may be fixed before the main release. I recommend trying the demo first (try gamespot.com) nevertheless, I can recommend this game to most strategy fans.
 Ok October 12, 2007
W. Howell
35 out of 36 found this review helpful
This is a basic resource management game with a bit of exploration thrown in. combat is very limited and building walls to protect your city is awkward to get right and also pretty pointless.
It looks good and is strangely compelling to play, but it takes a long time to finish each map while at the same time being very easy (I am on about mission 12 of the single player campaign and have not had the slightest difficulty so far).
The only difficulty in this game comes from some maps having very limited resources /fertile ground available the odd mission with a (very generous) time limit and you having to get your hero to run round all the time to buy things from allied villages.
The vast majority of time spent on each game is slowly building up your settlement from nothing, promoting your knight and releasing the next set of new buildings. After about the 10th time it gets dull. A deep irritation is no matter how well you do in the preceding mission it has absolutly no effect on the next one, with you having to start from scratch each time.
Combat it simply a matter of building as many swordsmen and archers as you can (not many it turns out - I have always been limited to less than 10 units so far) and then overwhelming any opposition. There does not appear much point in defending anything as it will cause your already tiny army to be split up. There is siege equipment but it's equally limited.
The Much heralded Female settlers is simply the ability to call a fair at your town centre watch the couples dance about and then your buildings become slightly more efficient. Nothing to it really!
It may be better as a multiplayer game but I've yet to try it.
Personally I wish they would just bring out a version of the original settlers with better graphics
Update: I reached mission 13 and suddenly things got very tough! Suddenly there is a point in building walls! Its just a shame it took this long to give any kind of challenge and then a very hard one.
Looks great and strangely compelling to play, but... January 3, 2008
ZX81 with 16K rampack (Edinburgh, Scotland)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Plus points:
1. one of the best Intro's to a game I've seen - the detail and rendering are amazing. Also several cut scenes through-out the game are very well done.
2. Extremely detailed world. Developers have obviously taken a lot of care to produce a stunning and detailed world - fish in the lakes, crabs walking about, etc. Really makes it fun to play.
3. Something very satisfying about building up your settlement and watch your settlers go about their business. I guess like building a train set or flying a flight simulator - just building a nice settlement with content settlers is strangely addictive.
4. User Interface well laid out and very intuitive. Most people should be able to get going with the tutorial intro mission and common sense.
Minus points:
1. Way too easy. No difficulty adjustment that I can find. Simply build up your settlement and you have content citizens and loads of cash. Even maps with less resources (e.g. desert maps) just means that it takes longer to build up your settlement. There's no awkwards decisions here with limited cash and not enough food to go around. I never had a problem feeding or providing everything the settlers need on any map. Apparently they go on strike if they're not happy, but I never saw this once. Sim City this ain't.
2. Combat is a bit of an afterthought. Attacks from enemies are few and far between and really means there's little point in building walls around your city. With a decent number of soldiers you'll have no problem with fending off any enemy attack. Also, taking over a territory is simply a case of attacking the outpost there. This is a tiny building with enough space for 6 soldiers and the outpost seems to offer the soldiers inside no protection. Hence they're easily overwhelmed by a small force. If you could upgrade the outpost up to a castle (just like Settlers I) and populate with a decent defence then things would be interesting. But as it is, there's no reason to bother defending your land - just take it back from the enemy should they (on the very rare occasion) attack you.
Overall - combat needs a serious look for the next game - I appreciate that they're never going to compete with Age of Empires and those type of strategy franchises, but they need something more advanced and more difficult to master than this offering. Just way too easy for even mild fans of strategy games.
3. Some technical problems - needs a serious graphics card to play. My 512MB nVidia 7950GT was struggling in bits. Sreen scrolling is jerky, but that may have been also due to my 1GB RAM limitation (one of my memory sticks failed just as I was installing it). Also suffers from serious memory leakage. For the non-techno geeks out there, this means the game just continually grabs more and more of your computer memory the longer it plays. Eventually the game will crash, but you can predict the impending doom by the fact the your hard disk will start going mad about 5 mins before crash due to all memory swapping going on. I needed to restart the game about once every hour to avoid problems. The game actually says that it will run on 512MB of RAM but I seriously doubt that.
Overall - I like it just for the satisfaction of building a settlement and watching everyone going about their business. Beautiful to watch and a very detailed world that the developers have taken a lot of time to create. With more difficult and finely balanced resource maps that made you seriously consider every move you make and *much* more attention to combat, this could have been a real classic. Nearly...
Hey, I enjoyed it. October 28, 2007
W. Nelson (UK)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
There's three ways to play this game. Nobody seems to be touching on the multiplayer, which isn't my thing either, while most people are criticising the campaign mode, which I've played through to level 10 - and it's true it isn't difficult up until the teen levels, apparently. But there are also standalone and custom single player games, some of which will give you as close to a sandbox mode as you're going to get. I got a kick out of just building a sprawling community with lots of happy settlers. If that's your thing then this aspect alone will probably appeal to you but if you want a more competitive game then I can sympathise with the criticisms being aired here.
 NOT APATCH ON THE ORIGINAL SETTLERS October 16, 2007
S. C. Foale (stafford england)
6 out of 22 found this review helpful
I have played all the settlers games and this is by far the most dissapointing you need a very high spec graphics card (it states on the back of the case that it will only run on 2 types of card shame I was`nt informed about this earlier.If you like settlers stick to the earlier versions till something better comes along.Don`t buy this.
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