It’s been four years since we’ve seen an installment in the venerable Settlers series, and for some gamers it’s been too long. Long running series like these seem to have lost a little steam as of late, and this year Blue Byte and UbiSoft have morphed The Settlers from their 2D, sprite based roots into a fully 3D environment, rich with detail and animation. But is that all it takes now-a-days?
Right off the bat I’ll say that the style of play in Heritage of Kings is what’s meant to set it apart from other games in the RTS genre – and it succeeds. Its definately, um, set apart. Heritage is almost completely based on resource management. Now if you find that part of games boring walk away right now.
There are five different resources to collect: wood, stone, sulfur, clay and iron. In order to do anything in this game you’re going to need lots and lots of these resources, and lots of workers to collect them.
But wait -- if you have lots of workers you’re going to need to support them. Right, so bring on the housing, and the farms. And you’re going to need to upgrade those accommodations to keep your workers happy so they pay their taxes, because that’s where you get your money -- money you also need to do anything in the game.
If you can see where I’m going here you’ll start to notice that Heritage of Kings has one of the most interconnected city building systems in any RTS game short of SimCity. You’ll find yourself constantly building structures to support other structures that enable you to collect resources to let you build more structures... let me catch my breath.
It’s a good thing that Heritage is good at this, because for all intents and purposes... that’s all you do in this game. The game has you taking the role of Dario, an heir to the thrown or some such – most of the time you forget about the story due to all the building of, er, buildings. Most of the characters you meet along the way are equally forgettable as well.
Besides structures though, you also have to recruit an army, as a large part of any RTS is combat and as the name implies, strategy. Unfortunately unless you happen to be on the lowest end of the recommended age group (ESRB rating of TEEN), you’ll probably not find much strategy at all to the fighting. Your units move around and attack somewhat haphazardly, and you often feel like the battle is more a crap shoot that you can cheat at by just outnumbering your foes.
If the story is pretty lame, and the combat is almost non-existent, what do you really get in Heritage of Kings? Well, you get very pretty graphics, a soundtrack that suits the game, dialogue that sounds good (except for the unit responses) and a long (long, long) campaign. A long campaign is always good in an RTS... if the gameplay is varied and exciting. Alas in Heritage of Kings it is not. Every level plays out exactly the same as the last, full of...well, see paragraphs 2, 3 and 4.
If you were a fan of the series thus far, you should probably avoid this jaunt lest you tarnish the memories of your old friend. The game is downright boring, and although it looks pretty, even gamers new to the series probably won’t find many redeeming qualities in it. Now excuse me while I go try to find someone to have a multiplayer tech-tree battle with.
Review System Specs:
Compaq X Gaming PC GX5050
- AMD Athlon 3800+
- 512MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM
- NVIDIA 256MB DDR GeForceFX GeForceFX 5700
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
- 200GB 7200RPM Serial ATA hard drive
- Double Layer Layer 16 X DVD±R/RW drive
- DVD-ROM drive 16x max. speed
