Pioneers of Pagonia

I bought this for the Settlers nostalgia, but instead of polishing the base game and expanding the content, they just pushed out DLC. That’s a hard pass from me; I won’t be buying it.

I'm sorry but the game took years to finish (1.0 release) and the first thing you do is add an (mediocre) paid DLC? Hell no. You've earned yourself this review.

I bought this game in early access because i had hopes it would full and finished with its 1.0 release. It was still shallow, lacking content, unbalanced and just really easy. And now releasing a dlc to basically fix the content that was left out this soon after that? Seems like they did the good ol tactic of pay walling content that should have been in the game. then to also say in their post they are being nice by giving you a crumb of it to play it is just gross. This game is not worth your money.

This fails to reach the mark of settlers. It rushes too fast to too many specialized units making you vomit out buildings left and right. Here's a new enemy, you need this unit to counter it, here's a landslide, go get hammers, here's.. blegh. the fun of settlers was that you worked out a way to beat the level, get the appropriate resources. here that's drowned out by noise. Replay / retry is annoying because all the progress is blocked by endless mini dialogues which you have to click through without an obvious skip in an effort to have a story but it interferes with gameplay. and isn't particularly well written and clearly just an excuse for why the level is like it is. Which is fine but don't make me unskippably click through endless vapid text for it. a simple outline at the start would be just fine. just a bit of a let down

Not the Settlers 2 Successor We Hoped For I desperately wanted to love this game. As someone who grew up on Settlers 2, I hoped Pioneers of Pagonia would be its true spiritual successor. Unfortunately, while the game starts with a decent challenge, it quickly devolves into a boring time sink. The foundation is simply missing the depth that made the original games in this genre timeless. An Economy on Autopilot The biggest overarching issue is that the economy eventually runs on infinite autopilot with absolutely no stakes. Food is not required to maintain your population, only used to grow it. The actual use is limited by professions that ultimately run out of things to do (like miners, explorers). This completely removes the "status quo" survival pressure found in classic city builders. Resources are practically unlimited and don't feel like they are meaningfully "used up" in correspondence to their gathering rate. Regressive Logistics & Artificial World Design For a game entirely about logistics, several mechanics feel like massive steps backward. Having builders carry their own materials to sites instead of utilizing dedicated carriers is an artificial bottleneck. Furthermore, expanding your borders feels completely unearned; you can build military structures to expand your territory and then safely tear them down without losing the land. Protecting your lands is not required. You only need to fend off badly designed 'raids' from different factions. The world itself also feels incredibly static. Despite the lore describing "fractured islands," you are stuck on a single, crowded landmass. The lack of terraforming tools means that if you tear a building down, it leaves permanent, ugly bumps in the terrain , and the crop fertility system feels less like an organic farming mechanic and more like an arbitrary checklist forcing you to expand in specific directions - one example of many where artificial complexity is introduced where it doesn't generate a better gaming experience. Unsatisfying Combat The combat system is opaque, frustrating, and deeply unsatisfying. The awkward 1v1 "Mortal Kombat" dueling style feels entirely out of place. The difficulty doesn't scale well—strength jumps wildly between ranks —and enemy behavior is incredibly stagnant. Raids lack any tactical variety, with every enemy faction simply marching down the shortest path in a single group. Verdict: Seeing the game hit full release and move toward an expansion while these core structural issues remain is disheartening. We don't just need new content; we need the core systems to feel rewarding, logical, and connected. Cannot recommend in its current state.

Expected a good successor to Settlers 2 --- failed The campaign is too shallow. Buildings don't have too much variation in design, so it's hard to identify most of the buildings when you try to find a specific one. Now they started to released paid DLC just to add few more buildings and few chapters of campaigns .. it's not worth it, I'm not going to pay anything more ...

Overall: I have mixed feelings about this game. I love the look of the game and the superb animations as the village grows and the complexity around the resource chains get established - really does remind me of the countless months playing Settlers II & III, and I so want to enjoy this. You can see I have put in >280 hours or so. There is a quality game under here… but Somehow it just misses the mark. For me, the biggest miss is the combat and enemies on the map. I just don't get the decision to have Warewolves, Specres and Witches instead of 'human' or other settlers, combating for control of the map and those precious resources. As a 40+ year old, I’m just not interested in ghostly enemies and makes the game more childlike. Early to mid-game, particularly on the harder campaign levels there is a respectable challenge, but the constant raids by thieves and scaring your clan by the aforementioned Ghosts and Goblins quickly become tiresome as your army isn’t strong enough to counter effectively….They just prolong the game for no real reason until you’ve conquered enough of the map and built at least two or three of every building to get your economy humming and then all of a sudden you are overwhelming too strong for the enemies on the map and it simply becomes a matter of time until it is completed. My second gripe, is duplication. For no reason at all, the game forces you to build multiple different buildings or have multiple different resources that “essentially” does the same thing. E.g. You need a Village Hall and a Guild Hall which essentially does the same thing. You need a Wood workshop and a Workshop, essentially building very similar products. Then, army wise, you there is Guards, Soldiers, Fearnaught, Ranger, Warlocks, Blade Dancers etc. Each can only fight or defend against a certain type of enemy and run away or are useless against something else. Just feels ‘bloat’ to me. The timeline of nearly every game level is first 0%-20% is fun, starting to build your village and resource chains and establishing your settlement, 20%-70% grind, as you battle with the annoyances like thieves and unable to expand into areas needed for game completion, 70%-85% boredom as you have now pushed away the annoyances and have a foothold on the map and the game/economy needs time (on autopilot by this stage I might add) to build up reserves and strength and the last 85%-100% fun, as the final battles and game completion nears. I cannot say I haven’t enjoyed it, but I think my joy has been more about reliving my childhood and having fond memories of its vastly more superior predecessor than this game itself. Now I have completed the campaign and played several custom maps, my interest is declining. No interest in buying DLC at all for this game, especially noting that the first DLC essentially just adds more ‘food’ options (which very quickly become irrelevant in the game) and more ‘ghostly goblin’ type enemies that just don’t interest me. Its’ vastly overpriced for that and just echo’s the bloat comment I made earlier. If it’s on sale – and you enjoyed Settlers, this is the closest game I have played in a while so give it a shot. It’s not great, but it not terrible either.

1.4 review, bought in early acces. Overall, spirit of The Settlers is here, but game still feels incomplete and is overcomplicated in crucial things that made The Settlers games unique. -Buildings are not telegraphical, i often need to check which specific building look like. - Campaign Story blend, not interesting, mainly examines development of tech tree. -Overcomplicated tech and building system, for example there are lots of buildings, without options to upgrade. And for this reason, you build 3 different smiths, 3 diffrent furnances, 2 different soft things factories etc. Same thing in housing, food and others branches. Tech is locked... in kind of mission/development tree, u need to get this to unlock steel furnance. This is one the worst solution i saw in RTS Games. On mission with ghost i got a softlock on this tech tree, in result i could not get steel to get better units to fight back, which turn to slop and defeat. 6h of building a town perished. cause of softlock in basic thing. After almost 1 year after release. -Ooh yeah, so you get this overcomplicated style of development of a town, so you build your base very long, placing of buildings is difficult to balance logistics. This is not overall negative, but it could get 2 times quicker if game was made simple, in balance state, just like The Settlers IV. simple production branches. - overcomplicated military system, lots of different soldiers type, not very practical. Can turn the table when u got a bug or softlock in game This new take on slow base building dont know what it wants to be. In current state i cant recommend this. Waiting for 2.0 version. Buut, i can recommend The Settlers II, IV, and maybe V if u like more rts style.

Genuinely terrible for one very simple reason: The combat. If the game was just building up your settlement and growing your economy, attacking static camps to expand as you go, I'd say its like a 6/10. But someone decided that 70% of the gameplay loop resolves around recruiting units and then losing those units on a neverending tide of hostile incursions. Even if you match up the rock-paper-scissors thing (And you have to, unless you literally want to lose twice as many of your guys), you always need a slight numbers advantage to win a camp fight. And then its back to waiting for another 50 dudes to be recruited so you can kill the next one. No strategy, no clever tactics, you wait until your number is bigger than theirs. I naively thought the 3rd mission was just overtuned when it made me fight basically 75 scavs in a narrow valley. And I was hopeful initially on Map 4 when they speed you past most of the basic setup and give you a city to rebuild. But I quickly reached a point where there are 20 spectres and 30 thieves invading my town every 5 minutes, and I literally can't recruit units fast enough to fight them off due to my cloth economy not keeping up at all. So I literally sit there, get raided/robbed every 5 minutes, as I wait for enough forces to pile up so I can go and kill another camp. Who thought this was fun? Early Settlers games knew there wasn't a ton going on in the military part of the game, so they kept it simple and straightforward. To give some constructive feedback on what I think would help: - The game desperately needs defensive structures that are not just "Put Dudes until they die.", let me build fortifications and such that buff my units defenses so theres at least the OPTION to play defensively. Let me build walls and towers. - Camps shouldn't respawn most of their occupants within a few minutes of being attacked, it's frustrating as hell to kill a camp down to 1 guy only for it to suddenly be 12 again 5 minutes later. - Also, for the love of god, make camp guards actually STAY inside their camps. Particularly for scavs. Its absurd that some of their workes walk across the entire map and you have no choice but to wait for them to come back and fight respawning guards. - If you don't want to do any of the above, add a setting that just lets me turn incursions off. The game would be infinitely better if the whole thing was at least op-outable.