dungeon keeper was recreated. It's called dungeons I think. it has a great narrator and you can leave the dungeon. dungeon keeper and deeper dungeons were still the best though.
I think the late 90s and early 2000s were the golden age for these types of games. You had this the settlers series, Age of Empires, then there was a series called Anno that I used to love. We don't have anything comparable now, at least nothing that is enjoyable.
This is my absolute favorite city building/strategy game of all fucking time. I've been searching for a game like this for over a decade and I have yet to receive the level of pure satisfaction that this game has given me. The Settlers 3 is what is missing from literally every game made in the last 10 years.
Just as an addition to this, Black and White (minus the god awful tutorial) is the closest I've ever gotten. Can you imagine the combination of these two amazing games?
@@silentthief18 never heard of black and white, but i agree. Im very young but grew up with this and settlers 4, absolutely love the games. Ill try and check out black and white to see if its anything like this but i dont think anything can top settlers 4 imo. Something about these old games have so much charm
@@spacegrass6632 This weekend I was finally able to beat the second mission of the Romans on Settlers 4. After a long hiatus. You know what really grinds my gears. I was never able to beat that level when I was a kid . I didn't have the patience for that . I mean you just completed the first Roman mission where you literally annihilate the Vikings and you go against the Mayans thinking "Oh this is going to be a cakewalk" (they look more like Aztecs in this game. Even their squad leaders look like Eagle Warriors. But that's another story) and then when you finally moved your border to the South East you suddenly see a blue line appear across the mountains after 30 minutes. And then they start to build up their military and send their troops against you and your territory gets steamrolled by the power of the jaguar. Without a good food and mining economy you're toast. But once you know how the game works and set up your food economy and mining operations the Mayans won't attack you. I should have thought about that sooner
Settler 4 is very good. I agree, Settler 3 is indeed the best in the series, I hope you won't buy the new Settlers which is coming up. It may look good (Graphical) but it's absolute Dishit. They mixed Settler 3 and 4 togheter and took out the core features of them which made them fun. yea....don't buy it.
I remember first installing this game a couple of years after its release. I was completely blown away by the graphics and atmosphere of the game. Birds chirping, ocean waving, builders hammering. It took quite a while to understand the concept, however when I learned it, I couldn't stop playing. What a nostalgy. I still play Settlers 3 from time to time even in my 30s and I think this game still looks and sounds great.
Loved this game. If I had the skill and time, I'd bring this back with a modern update. I regret that the developers strayed away from the gold they made with settlers 3 in their later releases. This top down style and its elegant simplicity (and reasonable complexity) made this game great.
This game had me obsessed when it was first released. The graphics were so different from the previous game and looked to me as if nothing better-looking would ever be created. The gameplay was very enjoyable, although I did miss the splitscreen multiplayer you could play Settlers 2 with if you had a second mouse connected.
Never heard or seen of this game before (apart from you mentioning it in other videos) but I turned my nose up at it when I saw it because of the graphics but my god is it a good game !! Just bought it today and I love it. Thanks for the great review as always :-)
Got it last year on the gog sales and I'd admit it's deep. Just to note there is no fast forward button. But it was satisfying waiting for my army to amass into a huge armada. Hearing every sword hit in battles was... immense. Thank you Mack.
Even when you don't play against the AI expanding your borders to find new resources and watching your settlers go about their day transporting resources, producing food and tending their fields just has that little something. It's really rare for a game to be this in-depth with it anymore because that's a niche market and most triple A publishers don't do small projects for a modest profit anymore. It's go big or go home all day every day, so supply chains are dumbed down, processes are truncated and simplified and the focus is on the action because that's what more players might potentially be interested in.
OH wow the nostalgia!! I remember getting the demo off the CD from PC Zone and playing the shit out of it. Sadly, only ever played the demo as couldn't afford the full game. Loving these Retro reviews Mack, really brings me back to when games where fantastic and usually always came with a wealth of options and content. Hope to see more from you, would love to see a Half Life or Quake 1 & 2 retro review!!
I recently revisited this game, and I think I remembered why I abandoned it in the first place; it is NOT a city builder, and it makes this clear within a few hours of gameplay. This is because you can run out of stone quickly, meaning you can't build any more buildings, and in a game that on the surface appears to be at least partially about building a bustling civilization, this ends my citybuilding aspirations quickly. At some point, you are forced into a strictly war-based economy, so if you enjoy playing at a slower pace, you are out of luck.
You should really make a retro edition of the first "stronghold" game. Very similar to settlers 3 actually. If you haven't seen it you MUST check it out
I remember when I was a kid the computer games they had for us was just as detailed as this game is. Pajama Sam was my favorite computer game as a kid.
Not sure why but the look of this reminds me of another game from around that time -- Caesar 3. I remember having so much fun with that, great game with amazing music to boot.
this is the first rts game i owned on pc. god knows where id be today if it wasnt for this game. if any game requires a remake/expansion its this game. especially when you consider how bad settlers has got recently.
Agree with alot of these comments - one of the best city builders/RTS of all time for me up there with AOE2. The fact im here thinking of buying it again to play shows how good it is....
Hey Mack, did you ever play Alien Nations/the Nations? It and Settlers were two big rivals over here in Germany back in the day, but I think AN never really made it big in the anglosphere. Personally I prefer the Nations series over the Settlers (mainly because of the fact that the titular nations have actual character compared to the rather bland and not-all-that-different flavours of Settlers), but I'm curious about your thoughts there.
I think you're right about the attention to detail. It definitely seemed like it was greater back then but maybe it has just shifted. There is still very high attention to detail just not where you (or we) want it to be. Now obviously the attention seems to be more focused on visuals, nothing wrong with that for me but I do wish they would focus on some of the smaller stuff like they used to. Dwarf Fortress is very good with this. Yeah you need to build all the buildings, but obviously you need to produce the damn things at those buildings and have it stockpiled so your other workshops can use em. Rimworld too obviously. I could be wrong here since I don't watch a lot of anime, but some of the older movies also feel like they had so much more attention to detail in them compared to these days where yeah, they generally look better, but small things are missing. They're having a studio ghibli event thing here in the US where they're showing all the movies in theaters so I've been going to those. I've never watched them before and I'm not huge on anime in general so I don't think I'm really biased in that like I would be with videos games since I've been playing those forever.
You talked bout how you can determine the ratios of who gets coal. You can do the same with food, so if you dont have lets say fish or something, you can get bread or pork sent to the gold mine. Also means you can run all mining of of 1 single food ressource if you wanted. I figure there might be a penalty to this but im not sure.
Mack, I think you should try Anno 1503. Also has an amazing attention to detail with huge production chains. The later Anno games are dumbed down compared to it
i think i remember why Settlers 2 is still my favorite one.. this looks like a nice followup but looking back the art-style isn't as great. feels more cluttery and stuff. i'm just looking back on the older games now as the New Settlers game looks intresting to me.. compared to the past few games they made and i'm looking at how they slowly lost there older Settlers way.
Oh this is one that takes me back, I used to play the demo of this all the time when I was a kid, never got an allowance for games so demos were all I got; and it's been sitting in my gog library for a while now. How did I forget this?!
Settlers 3 was the first game i ever played back in 2000-2001 when i was 5 or 6 years old. Got it on GOG for nostalgia, my mom still plays it to this day.
Settlers 3 was epic.. I wish they'd remaster things like this.. this great amount of details. Also.. side note: you can feed each mine each food.. just gotta hit the good distribution screen to change it
the new settler game that is in the making is done by the same guy who headed Settler 3 back then. I am slightly excited. Still sad that after Settler 4 they only ever did one settler race. I loved the different ones in 3 and 4 especially.
I loved AOE 2 AOE 3 story was Good the gameplay was fun but could have been better I dont know about AOE 4 part of me think that it could go horribly wrong
I loved aoe 2 as well. Aoe 3 had a good story, but didn't add too much in the way of gameplay. Age of mythology was a fun spin off. As with aoe 4, I don't think it will live up to the expectations
I hope they be true to the franchise. Because in modern days we all are playing games in a console which makes games like AOE tough to play and eventually poor sales.
"this is what you got for a DLC back in 1999" ... I agree 100%. But come on, Blood and Wine. You can't ignore how much content it added to the game and how masterfully it was done ;) Even if you don't like Witcher 3, which I respect.
Totally agree about the 90's being a great decade for game development. The work and art that came from that era of pc games was beautiful to witness. Big fan of Settlers 3, loved the attention to detail and the light hearted aspect of the game.
DLC's back in the good old days were called "Expansion Packs" and lots of games received them, it was more common than not to find Expansion Packs for various games. So that's the origin for DLC's really, instead of coming in physical packaging and on physical media like either floppies and CD-ROMs, its all digital now. And "Gold" versions of games used to include all the Expansion Packs and any game patches that had been released up to that point. So, if you if were smart, you tended to wait a bit to see if a Gold version was planned and then you got that instead as it only cost slightly more the actual game but much less than the game+Expansion Packs. So it saved you money and any serious bugs would have been patched out from the get go. So it was a win/win.
may i ask what is the beautiful music playing in the background/outro? great review btw, i will give this game a try as i have finished settlers 2 some 25 years ago and my nostalgia kicked in
I been playing settlers 4 since the day it came out and love it. I always wanted to try settlers 3 and its only $3 Canadian on Ubi's store right now and so I bought it. I do like it and its kinda fun, but i just feel Settlers 4 is a notch better .....its cleaner, less chunky and just better all around, but im enjoying having fun with Settlers 3 :) and for only $3......how can one loose ?lol :)
Mack please do a retro review of command and Conquer red alert 2 or return to castle wolfenstein Both franchises that have been utterly ruined by becoming consolized Also they were a huge inspiration for me to start developing games myself and are a huge reason why that's what I do today
I wouldn't be so quick to say how great expansions used to be in the 90s- remember the expansion packs for the original C&C and for Red Alert? Very expensive, but contained just a few crappy missions, totally disconnected from each other (not campaigns), with no FMV. I remember saving up to buy C&C Covert Operations and being so disappointed.
Looks like antoher great game as well, similar to what I've played - Settlers 4 Gold edition. I think the UI is better in Settlers 4, you get a creepy race to fight against, that has helicopters to terrorize you with. Thanks Mack for showing the this old game, for people to see what it was like back in the day and maybe get some people into it, the game itself and the genre in general.
Mack man, you should do a Worth a Play of Pioneer: Space Sim.. It's a remake of David's Frontier: First Encounter, might bring you back to your Elite days :)
This game was great, i found number 2 better but i think that is mostly my nostalgia. Btw Mac have you tried Caesar III Published by Sierra Entertainment? I think you can still find it on steam with "HD" UI nowdays.
Fantastic review thanks. We just forget how good games can be. And actually the graphics look very nice, really fit the kind of game it is. I like what you said about "attention to detail" in every area of the game not just the graphics, that is what differentiates the great games from the mediocre ones.
How does this compare with 2? I'm a huge fan of 2 and have been replaying the Gold version recently, but it's next to impossible to get multiplayer working. This looks a lot like the remake of 2, but I see the roads work differently...? And am I correct in thinking that Woodcutters and Stonemasons work differently now in that you have some control over where they work? (I realise this video is a little old now but this is the best review I've found yet so I figured you were the best to ask :) !)
Ahhhh. These games are amazing. I still plY my favourite iteration "knights and merchants". I love these engine building games. Factorio is a bit like this too. Maybe that is my favourite one.
i played settlers 2 for a long time and it was lovely. part 3 looks like it kept most of the charm and the graphics didnt age too badly. i might just have to play an older settlers game again. the newest ones didnt do it for me
I think Knights and Merchants looks quite similar to The Settlers 3, although I haven't played Knights and Merchant that much more since trying it on a Demo CD maybe 20 years ago. The graphical style seems similar to some extend, KaM released way back in 1998. The animation of the people are however very choppy in my opinion, but that can be fixed through using a beta release of KaM Remake found on the Discord server of KaM Remake (enable interpolation).
I only ever played the Settlers 7. I like well enough, but the Ubisoft shackles can get annoying. I'm curious, what do Settler fans think of the 7th game?
I loved when you pirated the game you got pigs instead of iron in the smithy. One of the best anty pirate solution in game. I still prefer settler 2 due to planning roads and because settlers 2 was a game of my childhood.
Settlers 2 is the gold standard for this series. You needed to optimize your routes to get those soldiers out the most efficient way. The combat wasn't anything special, but it was all in the building and supply chains
Are there any other rts game where the resources are all physically present on the map? I mean gold wood stone etc. does not get automatically uploaded to your untouchable digital account as they are being gathered
Hi Mac! Quick question, how did you change the resolution? All i can get is the sort of square ones, and it really triggers me to have black patches on the left and right sides of the screen.
