The Settlers has been around since 1993, becoming a popular strategy game of creation and tactics, leaving anybody playing it trying to mine all the resources the land had to offer and aiming for total domination. Well, that was always my plan anyway and I’m sure I wasn’t alone.
With many upgrades and changes along the years The Settlers has evolved to stand the test of time, still making it onto people’s computers. The Settlers HD is the same game we’ve all enjoyed for almost two decades, but it’s available for your Nokia phone, right from Ovi Store costing £3.00, courtesy of Gameloft.
You start the game with only a few buildings and a handful of men – or women, I can’t quite tell – and the first levels are there as a tutorial, which is handy as you’ll need to get to grips with the controls before jumping straight in, swords-blazing. The tutorial guides you through the basics, such as how to chop down wood, excavate for precious minerals and selecting multiple workers to get them all working on the same goal. Using two fingers to draw a box around the group makes rounding them all up much easier.
Once you’ve got the hang of the controls and the first level has finished, you find yourself shipwrecked and lost, where you must guide your survivors home while trying to stay out of danger. Well, avoiding trouble is probably impossible, the real challenge is making sure you stay alive. In this second level, building barracks and training an army for the impending attack is your first priority, you don’t want to get caught off-guard and without your army. With your men victorious, it’s now time to take on the new levels and reign supreme.
For any fans of the original game, this will bring back many memories and you’ll enjoy how it’s almost as feature-full as the games you would find on the computer. If you’ve not played any variations of The Settlers, it’s worth giving it a go, especially if you’re a fan of strategy games. If there are any negatives, it might be that even the biggest smartphones don’t provide a lot of screen real estate for a city-building game. That’s obvious without even looking at the title. That said, Gameloft have worked hard to keep everything clear and manageable nonetheless, with menus, maps and item selectors sliding out of the way to give you the best view possible. Pinch-to-zoom would have been a nice feature that the developers might consider for subsequent versions of the title.
The Settlers HD is from Ovi Store, for the Nokia N8, Nokia C7 and Nokia C6-01, costing £3.00.