Old, but not gold

After launching this review series almost exactly a year ago, today comes the sequel to the original The Settlers. My first touchpoint with this series, which I was to have fun with for many years before I lost interest at some point and whose reboot this year can hopefully reawaken it. The Settlers II was great and one of my first experiences with the computer game medium. It was a game with an objective, with increasing complexity, with strategies and depth. I had never seen anything like it before and I could spend hours on end simply admiring the little pixel men as they carried the goods from A to B via my increasingly branching road network.

Today, I couldn't recommend the game to anyone with a clear conscience - too old, too complicated and simply too ugly. But if you really want to play it, you should check out the 2006 remake The Settlers II (10th Anniversary) . It's better than the original in every respect and is still fun to play today.Also because some exploits have been patched and you can no longer 'petrify' the enemy soldiers by prematurely tearing down the barracks. Probably one of the first tricks I found out by trial and error ... Memories. I digress. So, The Settlers II is a no-go in terms of gameplay today. And acoustically? Unfortunately, too.

Games from the The Settlers-series

The Settlers (1993)

Die Siedler II – Veni, Vidi, Vici (1996)

The Settlers III (1998)

The Settlers IV (2001)

The score, which is of course a gamerip with partly different track names and numbers, falls into the rare category: difficult to like even with nostalgia glasses. Quite simply because it has no identity. Due to the technology, we are dealing with MIDIs here, which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. But the jingling is really just that. Incoherent thrumming, which is sometimes nice, but mostly just boring. Nevertheless, I like some of the songs, but probably simply because of my romanticized memories described above.

Die Römer ziehen los (The Romans Set Forth), the main menu theme, is initially exciting with its fanfares, but at some point takes a wrong turn and metamorphoses roughly in the direction of an underground level from Zelda or Mario. Die Felder blühen (Fields Are Blooming) is reminiscent of ambient music from the Heroes-series, Ankunft in Japan (Arrival in Japan) is stereotypically Asian. The sequence of notes in Die traurige Bäuerin (Sad Farmer's Wife) seems to be based on In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg, while Das gesunkene Schiff (Sunken Ship) and Die Hochzeit des Feldherrn (General's Wedding) look like tracks from the animated Asterix-films. And while we're on the subject of TV: Das tote Schlachtfeld (The Dead Battlefield) puts its name to shame and sounds like the intro to a 90s TV series starring a talking animal who finds out that friendship is a great thing - yuck.

Within this literal acoustic test track, the only bright spot is Die Felder blühen (Fields Are Blooming), the game's theme song and the only track that is really worth listening to. For me, this is The Settlers II, this one song that perfectly supports the relaxed gameplay with its positive orchestration. This pulsation through strings and winds that creates familiarity with its recurring pattern. This form of repetition is also found in the other tracks, but here the melody is not annoying, but rather puts you in a good mood. So if there is one positive thing that can be emphasized from the Gamerip, it is Die Felder blühen (Fields Are Blooming), on the one hand and Der große Kampf (Great Battle), on the other. The track itself may not be anything special, but its style is reminiscent of the soundtracks to The Settlers III and The Settlers IV. And these scores are really good.