Recent reviews by Finlander

Roughly 11,5 - hours of fun for roughly 5 euros is a pretty good deal.

The basic loop is entertaining enough and keeps things interesting by constantly adding new characters. Of course there could always be more content and more details , but at this price the quantity matches the price.

Most of the easter egg characters are relatively reasonable and easy to figure out. Then others are not... Like finding Tewi, or getting Keine.

Still I was left wanting for more content. If there's ever a dlc, like say, new stage and additional characters, I'd buy it.

Well, almost 110 hours of played time for a game that you can usually get for 15 - euros or so on a sale.

Very solid city builder, with some need for polish here and there:
- Some general balancing between the missions. For example I spend some (pleasant) 4-5 hours with the second last mission of the Campaign. Then the last mission, 5 - minutes. The last mission was prefaced as some tough military scenario, so the winning conditions were pretty much just to have population of 1000, and kingdom rating of 50. So I could beeline to the 1000 population with the speed of immigrating citizen, and then get the you win mission message, complimenting me for my tactical acumen and how the armies of my enemies have been scattered to the winds
-Sometimes the mission narrative spoken description has lines that are not on the written mission description.
- Sometimes the game has some very minor glitches that can devolve in to massive issues. Like the ferry ports stopping functioning as ferry ports, and I have to destroy and rebuild them to have working ferries again, or sometimes reloading the save also helps.
Other time it might be citizens stopped using a bridge, which glitches the whole transfer between the landmasses, only for me to find out eventually that there is a crocodile glitched inside the bridge, and since it is blocking the deletion of the bridge I am left with the issue, unless I restart the mission.
-If you play on hard difficulty, the mission win condition parameters are shown on the Normal difficulty requirements, and then are updated in scenario to hard requirements.

However these are just nitpicks, as the game itself is enjoyable. Also the walk through the history is nice. Where you could see the emphasis of different eras, from building the monumental pyramids, to trend moving to building the mausoleums in the valley of the kings, as the pyramids were too susceptible for grave robbers, to hearing about this recent news of Caesar having been assassinated, and later Cleopatra managing the balancing between the Roman ambitions and her own ambitions.

The game could have been lukewarm enough for a positive review. However the Steam overlay and Ubisoft connect conflict turns this into a thumbs down.

The Ubisoft crash launches often, often enough that Ubisoft's technical support has it's own dedicated advice site to solving the problem by deleting the Ubisoft folder at the local app data. However that treats the symptom, not the root cause. Usually I can expect anything to +10 crashes a day, worst being blue screens. This conflict only seems to happen when playing the settlers through steam. Then there's the choice between the pest and the plague, as I noticed that disabling the Ubisoft game overlay allows me to play the game indefinitely without crashes. However then It is replaced with another bug where I cannot exit the game . So when I hard quit the game the saves are not synched, as I found out after losing few hours of ingame progress more often than once. So hopefully I get to proceed the game usually in 10-15 minutes intervals before I get the message about ubisoft detecing an unresolvable error, and having to shut down.

Gameplaywise. I remember how older installments of the game used to have this philosophy of certain professions having to be easily recognizable. Like (meat) smokers house would look like smoking house, with the worker looking like walking cigar with singed black hair and all that. Most of the buildings in THIS game look generic and similiar to each other, with uniform color themes and bland worker routines. The game has 3 - different biomes, where the professions are still the same, but building "skins" are different, at least there was a little bit of creativity in creating 3 - different styles for same type of building, but in a different surrounding.

The combat Ai meets the minimum, though it has these silly moments where I target enemy, and the enemy and my units bumb to each others trying to run past each other.

Following the movement in the settlement itself is satisfying enough. With one settler being for each task, or idling. On other games like Anno 1800 you can have the lively city population with alot of population going through this "theater" of daily live. In this Settlers everyone occupied is doing excactly that, which I like to follow. Though sometimes it feels a little bit silly to look at this idiot conga line spanning through my settlement, when for example I sell 200 units of wood , and 200 settlers start moving the wood, one piece each, leading to this long line where they politely wait on one road to the harbor to unload that one piece of timber. Granted you will be able to get donkey carts that can move 8 - units of anything, which helps to avoid congestion like that. But sometimes I still don't use them because I simply enjoy watching the Hell's traffic jam that is suddenly having several hundred settlers moving several hundred products at the same time.

Speaking of delivering. If the delivery is interrupted, it is not picked up from where it is interrupted. I had build a watchtower relatively far from closest storage, and it would take roughly 3 - minutes for a settler to deliver the stone needed for construction. Only the settler got intimidated by enemy military unit and runs away. So when they start re-carrying the material, it's a different settler, and all the way from the storage all over again from the start, not for example from where the carrying process was previously interrupted.

Also other lacking life quality improvements. Like It would be nice to be able to queue research, and not having to click them one by one everytime research is finished.

Visually impressive , and I'd say at least Gefroce 4080 is needed to bring the full visual glory out.

The story kept me interested, though I could see that the protagonist Ethan Winters is still suffering from chronic case of cluelessness. The atmosphere and atmosphere building was stronger than the storytelling, and I usually found myself being more interested on the notes found around the game, rather than the main story itself.

I always autocorrected the DLC "Shadows of Rose" as "Nightmare of Rose" in my mind, and its not the good kind of nightmare because it was such a drag to get through .

Nonetheless thoroughly enjoyable, and the bonus content has generous amounts of material from concept art, to making of videos.

8 mission campaign, with the game price and the content depth matching each other. Short, like this review, but the price is right.

Unbelievably unstable, up to a point of where I stopped playing the game before having played all of the game content. This is a shame since I liked the first Jurassic World Evolution, and this game itself is quite enjoyable and relaxing.

There is any number of triggers that seem to crash the game, whenever it doesn't crash on it's own. My system specs heavily exceed the requirements, and I play heavier games without issues. These are kind of "soft" crashes were the game just drops without any effect on performance, and it does not even show on the windows event viewer, nor any other lists cataloging the system & application failures.

Guite good game, as testament to this is my 101 hours of played time. Considering that this is a game of certain subtype most people who come by this game already know what they are looking for, like those Pharaoh and Caesar games. Therefore there is no need for lengthy explanation.

However be noted that that there is some weird issue with the game where it usually takes 10 - 15 minutes to load. Other reviews have pointed out the same issue. So I usually take a shower, put coffee on, or clean the flat or any number of other things to pass the long loading time.

There is really not much to say, good monster game from a different perspective that was good for a bit over 5 - hours.

Your start with a baaa~ and end with a roar.

What a delightful little game for a delightful little price.