tony cowling @ACM2000

The Settlers II: Veni, Vidi, Vici (DOS)

Comes highly recommended

The Good
This is one of those games where you can set up your little settlement and then just sit back watching them go about their daily lives, cutting down trees, hunting for food and mining the various types of valuable substances which can be found in the mountains, the little people are extremely small but animation is fantastic through out especially on the backgrounds as you can see deer running in the forests, bunny rabbits hopping across the landscapes and the trees swaying in the wind. The graphics them selves are 2D but with the isometric view you get a cool 3D effect with each and every building being lovingly designed by the people at Blue Byte software with attention to detail second to none.

You start with a completely blank canvas and your HQ in the middle of the playing field, you are restricted within a boundaries at first but this can be extended once you build a watch tower and barracks but first you must start with the basics, build a forester and a woodcutter, these will cut down the trees and replant them so as to keep the stock maintained, from here on you build all of the available places of course remembering to send out the scout to discover water and other valuable stuff needed for you to succeed.

Once you begin making your way through the various chapters of the game you will discover new buildings and you will encounter other tribes, its at this point that you have to keep extending your empire by building barracks and watch towers to train your villages in the art of combat.

Each chapter can take quite a few hours to complete, in fact this game could ruin your life as you may find yourself turning up late to any plans you may have just so you can squeeze and extra hour out of the game. Its clear that a lot of time and effort was put into this game and it was a shame that it wasn't big in the USA, coming from a small company and selling by the bucket load in Europe it may have stopped Blue Byte being sold to Infogrames, the reason for the failure in USA was due to extremely bad marketing by SSI, they failed to get enough ads out and the magazines just looked it by and who knows, if the series had been such a massive success as it is in Europe they just might still be there own company.

The sheer amount of detail in your settlement when you have progressed on to the later levels will impress, your village becomes a large town and features loads of little people going about their daily lives, I didn't think it could get much better than this but the sequels proved me wrong and im eagerly awaiting number 4 in the series

The Bad
The main flaw with this otherwise brilliant game, combat is a case of just er..... watching and hoping that your man wins, some interactivity on this would have been fantastic and really raised the tension levels when you go to take on the evil forces.

The Bottom Line
Just go out and buy it NOW, you will not be dissapointed.

By tony cowling on February 19, 2001