By Kieron Gillen on February 12th, 2010 at 10:30 am.
Okay – I haven’t played this, but conceptually it’s interesting. Well, kinda interesting. Settlement: Colossus merges a city-building game with the casual-staple of the hidden-object game. The mind boggles. There’s a one-hour demo if you fancy giving it a crack.
Why would one destroy a city building game with something as mind-boggingly boring as hidden-object-games?
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Dawn of Discovery (or is it ANNO 1404? Depending on where you live) actually has hidden object game play now and then, though they come in the form of completely optional quests given to you by various NPCs. It’s also a really very fabulous city-builder, though one of my friends insists Patrician 3 is a little better (more focused).
Usually they tell you that a few emissaries or monks or spies are lurking around one of your cities, and you have to click on them. They’ve got a subtly glowing outline so easy, right? That is unless you have densely packed, highly populated cities like mine with tall buildings. Sometimes it takes me 30 seconds to find them, sometimes (rarely) it takes me 10 minutes and then I just give up because the game (and quest) clock is still ticking and I’ve got wolves of various kinds nipping at my heels.
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I’m pretty sure that someone at RPS loves hidden object gaming. I wonder what he thinks about this.
Didn’t old RTSs sort of work as hidden object games? ‘Cause you had to find that one dude with that special power and so you had to search for him because the UI was terrible?
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I would love to see a good city building game. Can’t they just leave that other irritating stuff out?
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Dwarf Fortress.
The end.
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Actually i’m somewhat intruiged by this, the hidden object element gives you something to do between bouts of managing your city. I’ll have to take a look at this during the weekend I think.
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I had to look up “hidden-object game“. For other ignoramuses (like me) it’s where you have to find things in a picture. Like Where’s Wally (Waldo, Walter etc). You find the chap in the red and white hat and then you find other stuff, like a fireman losing control of his hose etc.
Am I right or completely off track?
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That’s right yes, isn’t it funny how a staple of some early adventure games has become a game form all of its own?
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It’s intriguing! I wonder if they have worked away around the somewhat tedious raster scanning of the mouse cursor to find the hidden objects?
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“a fireman losing control of his hose etc”
…is that a euphemism for something?
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My girlfriend actually played to the end of one of these games over three or four sessions. Some 120 – odd pages, all in fact about 15 – 20 unique stages on a possibly randomised cycle. She also completed the bonus mode which meant finding every hidden object in order on every page. Approximately 10 or 11 hours of dubious gameplay.
The thing is rather than hiding objects in an interesting context Where’s Wally style, they play with pattern, colour, texture and scale to obscure objects “in plain view”. The vertical line of a pillar in an Egyptian pyramid tomb may in fact host a comically over-sized pool cue, for example. The more interesting puzzles involved some slight wordplay – your list entry may ask you to find “two spades”, the image in fact hiding one spade as in shovel and another spade as in the card suit.
It all brings to mind an old gag comic hidden object puzzle, probably from a MAD magazine circa 1985… which tasked you with finding five animals. Four were cleverly but rather simply camouflaged around an image of a house, in clouds, trees etc. but when you turned over the page to look at the answer it’d tell you that all the animals were inside the house where they belong and if you were seeing animals anywhere else you should probably seek medical advice.
The stinker is that after putting all that time into the game and telling herself that the reward would somehow be worth it, the final page (no more complicated than the very first page) having been completed, the ending amounted to “A winner is you!” and a return to the welcoming embrace of the game’s home menu.
And embrace that she turned away and never looked back on since.
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How exactly does it combine them? Or do I actually have to try the demo?
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That link leads to a terrible download page. Two out of the four linked mirrors don’t work, and you have to click through multiple pages to find out. This one does work:
http://www.filefront.com/15559303/SettlementColossus_1660.exe/
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“you have to click through multiple pages to find out”
…so kind of like a hidden-object-game even before you install it! Genius. :)
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Is this like Virtual Villagers?
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certainly looks like it
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I used to feel this way about the packages in cnc games. 3 promotions in a multiplayer game and your early tank could savage a base and retreat and end up unharmed. Or yunno find a bomb and die.
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Just tried it out.
You go to certain locations where you do a hidden object game to e.g. collect firewood. This requires an axe which you collected earlier at the forge where you did a hidden object game collecting various tools. So you might say there is a little bit of resource management, but it’s not very strict, nothing happens if you run out of food, for example (apart from having to collect more before you can do anything else).
You get to “build” your city by collecting x amount of resource y in order to build a certain building. It’s all strictly linear, though, so I wouldn’t really call it city building.
It’ pretty boring and repetitive and lacks what the usual hidden object games have: Variety. No fun searching mushrooms and mushrooms and mushrooms and firewood and mushrooms and… you get the idea.
Basically I stopped after about 50 minutes because I didn’t see this going anywhere. It only promised more of the same until you completely “build” your city. Which shouldn’t take that long. No replay value, as far as I can see.
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Yup, this is pretty bad. It isn’t even a real city builder, because you can’t decide anything. They just tell you “now you need to build a forge” so then you have to go into hidden object game mode until you found 10 sticks and 5 clumps of clay and 5 clumps of ore or something. Then they will tell you the next thing you need to build and for that you will need another 10 sticks.
This is really just to kill time. The game will just keep you busy for a long time. You won’t have any decisions to make and you won’t experience fun.
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That’s a pity. Oh well.
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“…searching mushrooms and mushrooms and mushrooms and firewood and mushrooms and…”
sounds like some teenage weekends around September
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When I read that name, I sort of imagined a city building game where the humans are parasites on a benign giant. They build their cities upon said giant for protection, since the world is exceedingly hostile (due to some catastrophe), and in exchange the giant is retrofitted with armour and weaponry built by the humans, so it ends up being a sort of symbiotic relationship. Wars are more involving hostile giants and their symbiotic passengers than anything else, since those who latched onto any one giant don’t quite understand the relationships or social habits of these behemoth creatures, yet.
What else was I supposed to imagine when seeing the name ‘Settlement: Colossus’? People should probably throw random names at me to see what my imagination churns out, because I’m actually pleased by the realisation that the title of an RPS news entry gave me an idea for what could–with the right mechanics–turn out to be a fairly interesting title.
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Wulf, I was imagining a game like that a while ago. Except I had all human settlements inside giant robots instead of on giants. And these robots would stride around some vast landscape looking for resources that the colonies could use. And when one colony met another the two giant robots would sort of shake hands and people could pass from one colony to another by walking through the arms… That sort of thing.
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