I’ve been playing Settlers 7 for a few weeks now. I’m on the last campaign level now. It’s immensely frustrating at times because it’ll often crash on launch repeatedly, requiring a restart of the whole computer before it’ll get going. It’ll also crash occasionally when in the game.
Nonetheless it is entertaining. It’s been a very long time since Chris and I played Settlers 2 together, on nana’s old old computer (Pentium II!), but I cherish the memories. So it’s partly for nostalgia.
It’s frustrating however because it has a very chaotic difficulty curve. Some levels are genuinely tricky, and require several complete restarts. But most are exceedingly easy – in fact once you get to the victory-point-based ones, you often have to be very careful not to win accidentally!
I’m looking forward to finishing the campaign and playing some conquest-only scenarios, though I think I might have to give it a rest for a while in-between – I’ve found myself staying up past 1 AM more than once now. It’s the kind of game which engenders that.
Also, while it does run at maximum settings and full resolution on my iMac – I’m very happy to finally have one where I can do that with a modern game – it does feel a little sluggish at times. It could do with some optimisation.
