The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom

Say your opponent has four of the five points required to win, and they're about to hit the 20-man mark that unlocks the Biggest Army Victory Point. You check the other points they hold; one of them's for the highest population, and you're only lagging behind by 5. Without thinking you throw up the plans for three foresters and three pig farms, and your mad little settlers fling them up just as your opponent finishes his army, thereby taking away one of his Points. Suddenly it's 4-4, and the whole game's balanced on a razor blade. What do you do? What do you protect? Can your new pigs help?

For a game with such a chipper tone and so many friendly introductory missions, it's an awesome surprise how demanding and sharp Settlers 7 can be with the flick of a difficulty setting. This is wonderful design. On Easy, you've got a relaxing, moreish world-builder. On hard, you get a fierce strategy game that's damp with adrenaline. On normal, something in between. Settlers 7's online functionality is similarly diverse; competitive multiplayer is present, but so's a "helper" function that allows confused beginners to pull veteran players into their game as voluntary advisors.

The only time the game itself sags is during the rare moments when you end up sat on your hands, waiting for something to happen. As your model villages spread across the map, the tangle of production lines becomes increasingly hard to follow, and subtle flaws that the game doesn't prepare you for will occasionally bring your entire economy crunching to a halt like a spanner left in a pair of gears.

New constructions might take an age to be built because your wood and stone has been automatically dropped off in some inconvenient, distant storehouse. Likewise, an unexpected dearth of water can take forever to be fixed - you have to place new wells, wait for them to be built, wait for extra water to be carried to a storehouse, and then finally you watch the water trickle down through your whole economy, so to speak. That there are subtleties to management is obviously a good thing, but subtleties should be there to reward advanced players, not punish everyone else.

More waiting occurs in single-player once you have a map secured and end up drumming your fingers for five minutes as your settlers amass or dispatch the resources needed for some plot-related objective. While this is rarer, it's still more than enough time to sit and reflect on how Blue Byte Software's decision to make your settlers run everywhere instead of walking was either very lucky or very smart. The sight of a settler slowly pottering along with some game-winning brick or haunch of meat might have been too much to bear.

But this is only a minor issue. Settlers 7's biggest flaw right now is actually nothing to do with the game itself, but when you can play it. At the time of writing the game's servers are still being brought down every weekend by a weight of traffic that leaves you unable to even play Settlers 7's single-player for hours at a time.

Unbelievably, I'm not referring to Ubisoft's DRM servers here, which seem to have stabilised since their ill-fated launch and gave me no trouble. There is, in fact, a second set of servers unique to Settlers 7 which keep track of your profile, campaign progression, stats and other vital services like achievements you can post directly onto your Facebook account, and these are the servers which are sporadically getting brought tumbling down. At the time of writing this still hasn't been fixed.