Review of Widelands
Well, here is the second review of the renewed dynasty. I played Widelands all day yesterday, until 1 am. That's roughly 8 hours minus two for various times during the Super Bowl, although I did play for about half of it.
Widelands is an attempt to have a renewed Serf City aka Settlers game for the modern computer. It is completely free and for someone who played Serf City and loved it way back when, there is a nostalgia value, to be sure.
In Widelands, you play in real time, managing an economy and numerous items by building buildings. You build a well to get water. You build either a Coal Mine or a Charcoal maker to make coal. You get stone from a Quarry Hut you built. Then you build a Lime Kiln and you can turn all three into Grout, which is used for more complex building construction. Coal is also used to make Gold and Iron into ores, and it is used in smithies of various sorts to make tools, axes, or helmets.
Similarly, wood is used in a Wood Hardener to make Blackwood, which is used as a construction material. It itself is used in construction too. It goes to a Charcoal Maker to make Coal.
There are a lot of intricate items and buildings making tons of goods and using them. Sometimes, they don;t make sense. Which is better for upgraded miners, snacks or rations? The game was obviously translated into English from another language, and sometimes there are some issues with grammar.
The game has a lot of the problems Settlers had like the lack of a speed up button. You are constantly going at such a slow pace and you always want to speed it up. You could finish a scenario that takes two hours in a half hour, and it always feels like you are wasting time.
Also, the military engine is hella clunky. You expand territory by building military buildings and then send your soldiers to fight their military buildings, and then later, if you win, their's burns and they lose whatever buildings that were in the zone of borders that just shrunk. In other words, it takes forever to expand and move.
Plus, the bigger your city/town the harder it is on the infrastructure, and by the time you have built most of the buildings, and multiples of many of those, you are so freakin huge that it takes you foreever to expand outward militarily. Plus, you can only send out nearby soldiers, and they stay in the biuilding, so you are constantly building new military buildings to leapfrog your soldiers into them so you can attack, and then their territory is too far away to attack or bring your soldiers to bear on, so you have to expand out to there, which takes longer....etc.
So, they got the good stuff from Serf City, but all of the bad too, and that's not a great thing folks. Especially in this post-Roller Coaster Tycoon era.
I did have three crashes to desktop, but the game saved right by it each time, so I lost practically nothing. The game does have multiplayer functions, and there are three different skins for buildings. It has fewer animations for figures than I'd like, and many look very similar, like Hunters looking like construction workers. My favorite animation is by teh Gamekeeper who releases animals into the wild so that your Hunter can always find meat.
It was fun to play through a few scenarios and remind myself why the game was great, but it also reminded me of the sever limitations it had.
Overall Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars. Play only for nostalgia