The Settlers® 4: Gold Edition

Game of my childhood. Was happy to see it here on GOG, however i was never to get it running for me. Quite sad.

Doesn't start on windows 10

Settlers 1 to 4 are 2D rendered while the 5th and so forth are 3D rendered. From the 2D family this is the WORST instalment of the series. It's not Win10 compatible. You have to try an ungodly large number of combinations of parameters and tweaks at your window's compatibility tab until somehow you can make it work...for about 5 or 6 runs of the app, then it never opens again. When you do are able to open the app, you will face all kind of graphical issues, glitches and display mode errors. Once you fix them by messing with the in-game video options (although I still can't make it play in full screen mode) you will face the next problem with this game...the fps. No matter how powerful PC's today are, the game engine is old and runs at 30-40 fps. The animations, the motions and basically everything moves glitchy-slow, like eating their own sprite frames. Did I mention the cut scenes sucks ? They were made in an age were 3D graphics were basically blocky shapes with basic dot-product lightning effects with no shadows. Arggg, the primitives times... But if you are born with the gift of patient, you will gather enough will power to ignore all this. But don't worry, your mental skills will be put to the test the very next second...WITH THE GAMEPLAY ! Settlers 2 had a smart and dynamic economy-building system, but then Settlers 3 screw it up and Settlers 4 took all the those bad ideas from the third instalment and made them all worst (not gonna enter into details because I just ate a sandwich and I don't want to throw up). Basically clumsy map dotting, unclear resource deposit stocks, goods are all over the ground and you can't distinguish it from the eye-candy scenery, etc. But non of this actually matters because without any warning and without you being prepared the enemy will come and beat the living crap out of you ! SWIFT AND SWEET. You burst into a rage because of that but at least the game had the decency to crash intermediately after, so no offence taken !

Its hard to believe that You need to pay for the game, and than search internet for "shady" ways of running it. GOG must be joking!!!

Finally the newer version worked in Windows 10, is the multiplayer broken. When starting the game the screen freezes and at the opponent side it starts.. but with leaving of the host party. I wasn't able to get the task manager as it was behind the game. (I'm not starting about messing all of my windows over my multiple screen setup).