Settlers II.5? It might be crazy enough to work! [UPDATE: 17/01/12]

 In what seems to be a "bring back old games feeling" week, we are reviewing a fan-made project of the best settlers game in the franchise according to popular opinion, the return to the roots project.

I actually bumped into this project while writing my first article this week on nostalgia (I'm never shutting up about this am I?) and my eyes just popped when I saw what it was actually.

So lets start with the basics. Settlers II was released in 1996 and it was a tremendous success from its predecessor Settlers I, adding a solid single player campaign which would make you travel from the nordic icelands to the deep bowels of hell itself (it looks like it anyway!).

But like every game in the book it gets old and replaced by newer and sometimes worse versions of the game, but even sometimes games don't die, their player base continues when the developers stop and this is why Return to the Roots, and other mods, exist.

Return to the Roots is an open source Addon, this meaning you will need the Settlers original game so you can modify it to the needs of this modification, created by Settlers Freaks. They not only revived this installment but also revamped it to work better adding things like HD configurations (or sort of like HD), multiplayer without sharing screen and online, and new skins and fixes. 

The prize of this is actually the online, you can challenge your friends and even try and topple the best players who are in the ladder, so the fun doesn't just stop at the single player.

Anyway, this is a fan project, and its not just all fun, first of all their main website is completely in German which is hard for people who don't understand the language, like myself, and even their English page is a raw translation of the German text there (much like google translator). Second, there is no troubleshooting and not a single help, so if you try and post on the forums be sure to wait a bit for the reply. And thats just it I really doubt most of the people who love this game knew about this and if reading this might be either eager or completely scared to play this game again, but try it you know you want it.

Update: Thanks to Spikeone, who I might guess is on the group of developers, that commented below about RTTR troubleshooting platform which is pretty organized and all around great!  Click on the link below if you are having trouble at anything.
Check it here: http://bit.ly/z9TPD6

You can find the latest stable version here.

http://bit.ly/yPSmX1

And look up for RTTR in the social outlets! 

Facebook

Twitter

Youtube

In their Youtube account you can find ways how to install it and movies like the one I posted above! Feel free to comment this below or on Twitter or Facebook