The Settlers® 2: Gold Edition

Y

5/5

One of the best strategy games of the 90s gaming golden age. Spent many hours playing as a child and now playing with my son 30 years later, sublime.

Simply the best version of all time in The Settlers history - Im loving it, thank you so much for this opportunity to be able to play it again. Nothing beats the good old times in gaming history.

The first 15-20 hours are awesome! Especially since some new games cost $60 and don't even last that long, I got my money's worth with Settlers 2: Gold :) My issue is that I wanted to play this game forever and that is simply not to be. Mainly, the further you get into the game and the larger your settlement becomes, the more time you spend putting out fires and getting into some REALLY tedious structure building (and by building, I mean long queues). The battle system is terrible, but battle is not the main draw of Settlers 2. In this game, resources are finite and they WILL run out if you take too long. So you cannot really sit back and enjoy the ride (which is what Settlers 2 is supposed to be about) because you have to expand as fast as possible and eliminate your enemy because once your mines expire, that's that. You can send a geologist and look for new mining spots but it is hit or miss if the geologist will find what you need. Not to mention the fact that this is NOT Simcity. There is not always an alert if your settlement has a problem. If there is a hidden problem and you actually pick up on it, good luck trying to find the cause of it...unless you really like to dig into unclear reports in small print. Of course, part of the fun of Settlers 2 is seeing a problem and figuring it out for yourself, rather than having the game hand the solution to you. You know, using your brain :) The problem is that these very cool puzzles do not scale. When your settlement becomes large, it is too many puzzles at once and most of them are quite similar. Yes, you can pause the game whenever you like but Settlers 2 is slow enough! The slowness is very zen and satisfying...in the beginning. But then you are trying to figure out why 1/3 of your structures are not producing their product and you realize that you will have to build MORE of the same structures that you already have built. And now you will have to sit around and wait and wait and wait for the structure be built... Sigh. This game just becomes too much of a good thing.