The Settlers New Allies Review – A solid and fully-featured port

The Settlers New Allies is a surprisingly good fit for the Nintendo Switch and a much-needed boost to its limited city-builder and real-time-strategy library. It has a relatively slow-burn campaign, plenty of customisable gameplay modes, and streamlined mechanics that feel well-suited to relaxed handheld play, while the Snowdrop Engine proves incredibly scalable – at least for the small screen.

Going from medieval to fantastical

If you’re new to the IP, The Settlers started life as a medieval city-builder with real-time strategy elements. For two decades, the reception of the sequels vacillated between good and bad, closely correlated to which gameplay element was dominant. City-building and supply-line management proved most popular and New Allies keeps that at the forefront. It also sticks to an entirely fictional setting with no recognisable nations, perhaps to avoid dealing with real-world migration and colonisation parallels.

It is, of course, a systems-driven game – with an emphasis on settlement layout and optimisation of supply lines rather than unit micromanagement – so the numerous tutorial missions and lengthy campaigns are great starting points to ease you in. The campaign even has an overarching narrative with somewhat crude cutscenes, which sees “Elari” survivors flee a violent military coup to a verdant archipelago that might just have been visited by their ancestors. They eventually form alliances with the “Maru” and “Jorn” people, which provides the perfect excuse to learn both the basics and a handful of special units and structures for each of the lightly differentiated factions.

It’s a surprisingly old-fashioned campaign that has you expand and battle across suspiciously linear islands, with water- or cliff-bounded paths, plentiful choke points, and the rare side path leading to some landmark. With AI behaviour clearly tied to mission scripts and trigger zones, you can often take it at your own pace, building up a large economy and army before steamrolling the AI. It’s great for casual solo play, but obviously nothing like the competitive multiplayer that’s all about optimised build orders, early and continuous disruptive strikes, and adaptability.

Plan, build, optimise, automate

No matter your chosen game mode, The Settlers New Allies follows the classic gameplay loop of starting with a handful of settlers mulling about a warehouse, then having to build up your economy and army through a mix of claiming land, gathering resources, refining materials, boosting production, and researching technological upgrades. Starting out is slow going, but once you’ve got a steady flow of resources, you can even sit back and automate many abilities like production boosts and even unit recruitment, leaving you to focus on commanding your army in the end game.

Lumber and stone are fine for basic structures and defences, but you’ll soon need coal and iron for your furnaces and blacksmiths if you want to forge metal and weapons for an army. Fishing and berry foraging provides meals to boost many basic industries, but wheat and pig farming – coupled with a mill, bakery, and rearing a few donkeys – will boost more advanced industries, speed up the delivery of goods to and from your warehouses, and open up advanced research to improve your structures, settlers, and army.

Of course, upgrades require multiple materials types and the challenge often comes from adapting to limited resources on some maps. This might push you to send engineers to survey and claim a distant mining spot; you might need to trade resources at special landmarks like old mines or ally outposts; or you’ll want to build a harbour sell off your excess goods and buy scarce resources.

It sounds complex and there are a lot of dependencies, but it’s more streamlined than many of its peers. Unlike many other games in the genre, there’s no real economic or social fail-state beyond slow progression and, of course, the impact that might have if a hostile army comes knocking early. Growing your population with housing is essential for attracting new settlers, but they won’t die from exposure or ever starve. They simply work harder and faster if you keep their homes and workplaces well-fed and connected by smartly designed road networks.

Similarly, each faction has maybe a half-dozen military units, melee and ranged, with some more effective against structures. They automatically assemble in a logical formation and only a few have activated abilities. As a consequence, even competitive matches boil down to army size, composition, and upgrades, rather than effective micromanaging during clashes. That said, harassing economic buildings and workers in the early game with a small army is a genre staple that still pays off.

Now if you’ve any experience with the prior PC games, the simplified elements and limited variation between factions may come as a disappointment – especially when you consider the misguided focus on levelling up factions for cosmetic unlocks, with paid-for booster packs. That makes it hard to recommend to PC fans, but the streamlined mechanics of The Settlers New Allies feels perfect for the Switch.

The Switch experience

Talking of the Switch experience, it’s hard to shake the feeling The Settlers New Allies was built for PC first, especially when navigating dense, multi-layered menus or trying to read some UI elements on a small screen. That said, the radial interface and dpad shortcuts work well after some practice – albeit more so if you’ve got a decent third-party gamepad closer in style to an Xbox or PlayStation pad.

The hex-style building interface makes structure placement easy; the construction menu is logically subdivided; radial menus allow you to quick select units like engineers and soldiers; while toggling automated production boosts and defensive abilities limits the need to micromanage. You can even set rally points and automate recruiting to maintain a chokepoint while you focus on growing your economy.

When it comes to the visuals, the Switch version of The Settlers New Allies has obvious cutbacks compared to its PC and current-gen console brethren, but it still looks good and the stylised visuals and intricate animations hold up well. I was most impressed by the steady frame rate, but the cost seems to be limited post-processing effects and obvious level-of-detail transitions and shadow pop-in when zooming in and out, or panning quickly across the map.

Despite that, it still has plenty of atmosphere thanks to the serene soundtrack, relaxing ambience, and settlers cheerful to the point of absurdity. In addition to praising their new town and you, the guild master, they merrily claim “no one is faster than me!” when ferrying goods around, or shout out that “hard work is good work”! It’s like some evil corporate propaganda for delivery services that exploit gig workers.

All that said, The Settlers New Allies pushes the Switch hard. I had a handful of crashes to the OS; v-sync could disengage triggering full-screen tearing and causing the cursor to disappear until I saved and reloaded; load times for the campaign missions are long (even when installed to the internal memory); and it’ll devour a full battery charge in less than 3 hours.

Conclusion

Wrapping up, The Settlers New Allies on Switch is an unexpectedly solid and fully-featured port but whether you’d want to pick up the Switch version – even if you’re fan of the genre – depends on your history with The Settlers IP and how you play.

On one hand, the streamlined mechanics, customisable gameplay modes, and move-at-your-own-pace campaign missions of The Settlers New Allies make it perfect for longer, low-stress sessions if you’ve got time to kill on the couch or in bed.

On the other hand, existing The Settler fans might find The Settlers New Allies too simplistic; the PvP modes require intense concentration that doesn’t feel like a good fit for the small screen; and playing on a big screen highlights the visual compromises.