Heritage of Kings: The Settlers [PC]

Long-running series The Settlers takes its first steps into 3D with Heritage of Kings, and in the process moves away from its traditional management gameplay into real-time strategy territory. Unfortunately, the attempt to cover both areas leads to it doing neither very well. And thanks to a number of other irritations, Blue Byte's latest is far from one of its greatest.

Heritage of Kings stars a tiresome hero named Darius, who's constantly being pestered by some kind of falcon. (Despite all our efforts, we couldn't get the archers to shoot it down.) Predictably, Darius is the son of a king, and grew up in hiding until his mother was killed by a marauding pack of black knights. There's also some mysterious amulet added into the bargain. Yes, it's the usual identikit fantasy nonsense.

Heritage of Kings has a wider selection of resources than most real-time strategy games. Five are gathered directly from deposits on the landscape, mines, or chopping down trees, while a sixth -- gold, or "thalers" -- comes from taxing your workers.

Although you can send serfs to gather stone from surface deposits, it's much more efficient to build a stone quarry over a larger deposit. Once that's up and running, five happy miners will come trotting out of your village center, ready to work -- but they'll need a place to live, and a farm, mill, or similar eating establishment to cater for their culinary desires. You'll want to build these facilities close to the quarry, so your miners don't waste too much time hiking to and from work.

But you'll soon outgrow the stone production rate from one quarry, so you'll need a stonemason's workshop to refine and improve your stock (requiring yet more accommodation space and food production). Then you'll have to think about improving the quarry, but that needs research, and improvements to your stronghold. And this is just one of the five resources you'll need to gather.

Even with aggressive expansion and resource development, it's very difficult to work your way down this process at anything approaching a satisfying pace. Although your workers look like they're toiling away, production rates are frustratingly slow, and it takes a significant amount of time to accumulate enough ingredients to make even simple structures. You'll wish you could reach down, Black and White-style, and slap your workers into working faster.

Once you do gather enough gold, wood, sulphur, iron, stone, and clay to muster an army, you'll be disappointed both with the selection of troops and your opposition. Battles with the AI quickly descend into messy free-for-alls, with soldiers running about uncontrollably. The best way to win is with either overwhelming strength of numbers, building heroes like Darius, or better upgrades -- all of which mean, you guessed it, more resource gathering and settlement development.

But it's a good-looking game, no doubt about that. The world looks pleasingly alive, with buildings full of tiny animated details, 3D landscapes that glow with color, and well-implemented weather effects as the seasons pass. Combat doesn't look so realistic, but we liked the color-coded columns that signal fallen soldiers -- amid the chaos, they make it easy to see whether the fight's going your way or not.

It's a shame the audio doesn't measure up. RTS games don't usually provide great opportunities for sound engineers to show off, but Heritage of Kings manages to be more teeth-gritting than watching America's Funniest Home Videos. Even the voiceovers to the cutscenes and mission briefings irritate, thanks to a shaky translation.

Leaving these minor points aside, the game's biggest problem is its pace. Having to build a complex collection of interdependent buildings from barely-sufficient resources is fairly enjoyable the first time, but once you've figured out there isn't really any payoff to doing it, having to plough through it again just to build a decent army isn't appealing.

Monotonous in single-player, it's doubly problematic when playing a real person. Having to develop cities for hours only to find unsatisfying combat isn't something most players will want to do repeatedly. Although there is a time-limited mode where good management can be enough to win the round, this has been done before, and by better games... Rise of Nations, for example.

Heritage of Kings' city-building isn't deep enough for a well-functioning settlement to be its own reward, and the combat is confused and equally shallow. It's too slow-paced to please the RTS crowd, and while the graphics are strong, the twee voiceovers grind away at whatever pleasure you might glean from them. Although the idea of mixing management and real-time strategy styles is decent enough, it'll take a much better game than this to pull it off.