The Settlers: New Allies

Introduction

The Settlers is one of PC strategy gaming's oldest running names, stretching back to 1993, built on a specific, patient loop of watching a self-sufficient economy grow tile by tile. The Settlers: New Allies, developed by Ubisoft Düsseldorf and released 26 March 2024, was pitched as a return to that legacy. Reading its full review history tells a different story than that pitch promised: a Mixed 49.2% across 1,201 all-language reviews, a launch that failed on basic technical grounds, and — more seriously — a fanbase that overwhelmingly says the game changed what the series actually was rather than modernising it.

A broken first day

Launch day reviews describe problems that have nothing to do with design taste. The two highest-voted negative reviews, both posted 26 March 2024 with 399 and 328 votes respectively, describe the exact same failure: the game requesting a CD activation key it never actually provided at purchase, blocking play entirely. A third major launch-day complaint, at 377 and 133 votes across two separate reviews, describes a forced-online requirement — the single-player campaign refuses to start without an active internet connection and a linked Ubisoft account, something several reviewers call a dealbreaker on principle for an offline strategy game. Whatever else this review has to say about New Allies' design, its first impression to a large share of day-one buyers was simply a game that didn't work.

"Not a Settlers game"

The deeper, more consequential complaint running through the negative sample comes specifically from the series' own longtime audience, and it's remarkably consistent in its wording across dozens of independent reviews. "Not a Settlers game. It is in the same genre, but it's far enough that it shouldn't have the same name," reads one detailed 62-vote review. Another, from a self-described decades-long fan, states plainly: "As already said in many other reviews: not a Settlers game, not worth the full price. It's just a fighting game now (which is apparently called an RTS)." The specific grievance is consistent: the traditional slow economic build-up — placing buildings, managing resource chains, watching a settlement grow organically — has been compressed and subordinated to real-time combat in a way multiple reviewers say guts what made the series distinctive in the first place. This isn't a case of nostalgia refusing change; it's a specific, repeated design complaint from players who know the franchise's history and say this entry abandoned its own foundation rather than building on it.

Three updates in two years

What makes this review's verdict harder than a simple "rough launch, since improved" story is what happened after release — or rather, what largely didn't. Steam's own community-announcement feed lists exactly three posts across the game's entire post-launch history: a "Gears of Prosperity" update on launch day itself, a "Technical Update" six weeks later on 7 May 2024, and an achievements patch over a year after that, on 14 May 2025. Nothing has been posted since. That is a strikingly thin support record for a premium-priced, NZ$64.95 release from a major publisher, and it lines up with what players themselves report: 22 of the 100 most-helpful negative reviews mention crashes or freezes, and unlike most technical complaints in this library's research, these aren't concentrated at launch — they continue to appear in reviews dated well into 2025 and 2026, including one detailed 328-hour review from January 2026 still describing the game hanging at 100% CPU. Steam's own achievement data corroborates a playerbase that mostly moved on: the single easiest achievement in the entire list sits at just 31.9% completion, and several further achievements sit at exactly 0.0%.

The alternative fans point to

One detail worth reporting plainly, because it comes up repeatedly and unprompted across the review corpus: several of the series' most invested critics specifically name Pioneers of Pagonia, a spiritual successor made by former Settlers developers who left the franchise, as the game that actually delivers what New Allies' marketing promised. One 92-vote review, from someone who says they've "played all the settlers games," scores New Allies 5.5/10 while directly recommending Pagonia instead as the truer successor. This review can't independently verify every detail of that comparison, but the pattern — long-time fans of a franchise pointing to a competing game made by the people who originally built it — is itself a meaningful piece of context for anyone deciding between the two.

Final Verdict

The Settlers: New Allies is a competently made real-time strategy game that, taken entirely on its own terms and bought at a steep discount, a real minority of reviewers genuinely enjoy for a weekend. It is not, by the overwhelming and specific account of the series' own longtime audience, a Settlers game in the way that matters to them, and its launch failures plus the near-total absence of support since — three announcement posts in over two years — suggest Ubisoft reached the same conclusion about its prospects fairly quickly. If you have no history with the older Settlers games and want a light, colourful RTS on sale, there's something functional here. If you're a longtime fan hoping this is the series' return to form, this review's research strongly suggests you'll be disappointed, and that you should look at Pioneers of Pagonia first.