Thanks for the heads-up. I pay my taxes and buy my games, but I draw the line here. I've seen about every type of DRM in the last 20 years, and this is a step too far, even though I have a perfectly stable connection and it probably wouldn't affect me. Sorry Ubi, it's a matter of principle.

Graphics are amazing, your citizens are smart, the game offer a nice blend of complex and easy to make decisions. The fact that gold is not circulating into the economy is nice as it saves you alot of the usually involved micromanagment. The big bummer for me was the DRM. The game stops if you lose internet connection! Seriously, If I knew that before I bought the game I would have used my money on DA origin expansion. I should be able to play my single player games when I want, however I want and while connected or not. Such a shame seeing a good game with this stupid limitation.… Expand

This outlandish DRM by Ubisoft is unacceptable , this will be in bargain buckets faster than you can blink .. and even then it will be too much. as someone else said who cares about the game when it has this appalling DRM attached to it ... wake up and smell the coffee Ubisoft gamers wont put up with it these days ,plus its just making piracy worse .. idiots ....

9 points for the game itself. 1 Point for the DRM. So ... 5/10. It remember every others settlers games, maybe sometime a little bit "previous-version-like". 1 point for this annoying DRM which prevented us from playing our game for days and days. Each time server is offline, or crashed, we can't play the game. With this protection, they killed the game.

Game is ok, but very strict in terms of resource control. If real life was like this - humanity would have given up generations ago. But, after playing for almost a whole day on my brothers PC, I disconnected his wWirelessUSB (to put USB headphones in - it was getting late and I didn't want to disturb anyone) 5 minutes later the game asked me to "reconnect to the internet" and wouldn't play. Ok, here's the deal. The internet is for the use of the people who PAY for it - Not for game developers to piggy back scam filled anti piracy ideas. And FYI, a full working version of the game is available "you know where" that doesn't require this system. I won't steal, but I won't buy this game either. It's a bloody cheek.… Expand

This has the dumbest story and characters I have seen in a long time. You play some silver spoon princess looking to attack some land her daddy gave her an order to or some crap. The dialog was physically painful for me to have to listen to. Not really because of the acting, but because of how generic the story was. And the DRM. Well what more can be said? All in all, it's kind of fun, but I would stick with the old Sierra games and save the headaches. The story is laughable (unintentional camp), and the DRM just kills the other redeeming features. It just isn't worth it guys.… Expand

Dumb Story, weak strategy, horrible DRM. This game is nothing like the Settlers series that came before it and has destroyed the franchise in my opinion. Whatever you may have loved about the Settlers, is all gone. Whats left is a cartoony impersonation without any real strategy. If it weren't for some quality work on the graphics side, I would give this game a zero.

Thank you everyone for the heads up on the DRM. I was appalled at spore for limiting you to 5 installs, but this goes one step further in ridiculous attempts to prevent piracy. Software publishers need to learn from companies like Stardock with their success on Sins of a Solar Empire.

To be honest it is absolutely appalling that DRM protection has made people downgrade games. While I do not condone DRM on any level other than theoretical, it is downright wrong to rate games badly out of a dislike of an element that is non-related to the game itself. My rating of Settlers 7 would be somewhere between 8 or 9, but as I've seen an increasing tendency towards downranking games with DRM, I'll give it 10.… Expand

On one hand the DRM is draconian (There are workarounds if you're into that.) but on the other the game is absolutely ... decent. It earns a fair 7-8 for the game itself, but loses 2-4 points due to the DRM depending on how strongly one feels about it. Therefore, it gets a firm 6 from me.

It is a nice new chapter in a beloved sequel, for me starting with Settlers 2. Not a great game, but nice. Great music, good athmosphere, but gameplay and game mechanics are quite unclear. This is a sort of "trial and error" concept. However, I will not buy this (or any other software, for that matter) until the DRM is removed permanently. Companies have a choice here: they can earn my money by making good games, or they can persist in endless patching and forcing spyware. We'll see.… Expand

I don't understand the rationale some reviewers have against other reviewers downrating the game because of its horrendous DRM. Believe it or not, the DRM is a HUGE gameplay issue. As a person who travels, I am restricted to playing this single player game to only times where I can access wifi. You will be locked out from playing this single-player game in the following scenarios: Your ISP has a temporary hiccup that lasts longer than the amount of time the DRM takes to timeout. While traveling without access to wifi. Ubisoft servers hiccup, crash or are down for maintenance. Router hiccups. Physical accidents, such as somebody accidentally pulling the physical network cable. This hinders gameplay to the point where I feel I am being punished for not torrenting the cracked version with the DRM removed. If you can't find the correlation between this overzealous DRM and gameplay, I think you should take a step back and look at the situation objectively.… Expand

Ok. so I’ll be another person bashing this game for mostly 1 reason – it’s DRM protection. Without it, it’s game for strong 7- small improve to previous one that wasn’t too grate but not even close to the greatest in series S2. And whole promotion that I saw was that it will be coming back to the roots with gameplay. Yep they really tried that, they even partly succeeded and some might like it very much, but me? - not really. Maybe because I’m just to old now, and as all old people I’m thinking that in my younger days everything was better, and sun was shining every day. But than again I spent hundreds of hours at S2, and with this one I didn’t even finish most of campaign and not even planning to any more. But coz of this DRM won’t give this game more than 5. For me Settlers series is totally single player type of game and I just can’t understand why do I have to have constant net connection to play single player. When I’m in my house where I have very good cable net connection I spent most of my time surfing or playing online, so for single player games I have time mostly when I’m out of home and here surprise – S7 can’t be played than… or rather – legal copy can’t be played as pirated one without problem. What a hell? They went so far in fighting pirates to actually make you unable to play the game whenever you want, but as this protection was ineffective (like all other protections created so far) after what? -a week after launch?- than you actually have to grab pirated version to bypass this protection to be able to play offline? How sick is that?! If any game developer want to protect his product with system that actually harass legal customer than better be sure that this system would be unbeatable, because situation when legally bought game is inferior to pirated version is totally unacceptable and just make game developer look very stupid, and this kind of developer deserves bashing – strong one.… Expand

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. I am a newcomer to the series which, for better or worse, eliminates any expectations I may have had from the series. I believed I was in store for a dynamic economic/military kingdom builder, but what I got was repetitive and narrow game play (tedious micromanagement can still be narrow). I was able to put in 5 hours before being so bored that I may never boot the game up again. 5 hours 5 score. The meat of my problem was in world layout, warfare, and victory. The nature of each level and the layout was redundant, and provided for pretty much the same game every level. Then there was the disappointing game component of "neutral" regions. If I have an army and they don't, I say sucks to their neutrality. In warfare I was disappointed in defense and offense. Defense, I wanted to have better control of towers and walls. Maybe this became available deeper in the game, I may never know. Offense was even more of a joke. There was ever only one way to attack a region, the horrible bottlenecks, and there was no command and control other the retreat. Finally the most important aspect of any game, achieving victory. I understand that they wanted to allow for different modes of ending levels, using economy, military, or trade, but it always felt as though my conquest was incomplete. The Victory Point system was a cheap out for the developers. The enemy, or myself, would suddenly be defeated because one held more regions, and had a higher prestige, never having to directly challenge the opponent on the field. Silly. High points of the game was that citizens were very intuitive and got their work done. Nice variety to the economy. There were many other problems outside the scope of this short review. sigh... When will someone let me build a real Kingdom!… Expand

For most of the Settlers series these games gave you the freedom and the time to build whatever you wanted but the annoying new "take and hold" victory points system causes you to build rush an economy to win which in turn shortens the game. Also maps feel a lot more restrictive as they are made up of small sectors with all fortifications ready built and army unit choice is limited. There are still a couple of bugs around one of which meant rolling back graphics drivers to prevent crashing and while I barely experienced any DRM issues the fact remains that it relies too much on both a stable server and a stable connection.… Expand

I have been tracking this game for some time and was a fan of the settlers series up to and including 4, but I lost interest in the gameplay at 5 and never played it since. Settlers 7 is an improvement and gameplay is a little retrospective towards its old style and also with some nice new touches and personalization. However, there is a beast of a problem underlying in this game which many gamers will use as an excuse (and probably a justifiable one) not to buy this game, and that is it's DRM. Whilst not as bad as other Ubi games that use this, forcing the user to be online 100% whilst you are on the game isn't everyone's cuppa tea, but at least with Settlers 7, if you do lose your connection it will attempt to reconnect for a short time. So, if your internet goes down due to a spike or some other reason, at least it will attempt to get you back in the game, whereas other games using this platform will just boot you off the game and won't even attempt to save where you were. I would have scored the game a 9 but for it's poor DRM system (my opinion), and I haven't written much about the game and its play, but you can get a good idea from the official reviews around the internet, they all pretty much agree that the game itself has high production values and has been released in a stable version at release with not too many bugs or technical issues - which for a new release on PC these days, is saying something.… Expand

Very Good game, make me remind of settlers II with huge improvements. There still some improvements that can be done in the graphical (some blurryness problem) and performance level (its heavy even with a super overclocked gtx285). The economy is very good but i would like some tune up to make it more real (like everybody must eat. and a sword , a armor and a gold coin to make a swordsman, like the good old days) The military is good but can be better (no soldiers promotions :(( ) . The game as return to its origins in a way, but as extended further in onothers, like the trade and researh. Overall the game is very good, as good now as settlers II was in its time or even better. So if you want to play a real setlers since 1996 try this one. I will rate the DRM because i have not encontered any problem with that sp far, but i understand that could be a problem to some who do not have a good internet connection. I will give it 93/100.… Expand

I'll give this game a ten just to compensate for all the undeserved zero's it got from haters who didn't like the DRM. Those zero's are completely not relevant for the gameplay, graphics, sound on which a review should be based on.

The learning curve is steep, but once learned, the game is amazing. The graphics and music are beautiful. I haven't had a bit of DRM trouble. My hope is that the story mode will continue soon.

The game shines with a general coat of polish. I have difficulty finding blemished areas. The graphics are great, same goes for the gameplay and music. In truth I think the factor that had the greatest effect on me was the raw nostalgia. This is the closest the settlers series has ever come to returning to the modal set by settlers 2 (one of my faveroit games of all time). On the downside the games story is absolute garbage (perhaps it was meant to be this way, Some of the scenes are so bad that they are infact funny). Also at time the game can be become tedious and boring (Such as sitting around waiting for trees to grow so you can collect more wood). Many people have complained about the DRM but I myself have found no issues with the product. Anyone who does not think that piracy is an issue is living a blinded existance, Ubisoft has the right to protect their product.… Expand