Settlers 2 and Blok for Amiga in 2025

I remember when the original Settlers was released on Amiga in 1993. I was living in Alice Springs at the time, and buying most new release Amiga titles was impossible there.

So I never got to play it.

Actually, in the last two years I finally tracked down a physical box release of the original Settlers for Amiga, but I haven't found the time to play with it yet!

And now, in 2025, we have the sequel! Settlers 2 for Amiga, finally released by Look Behind You including with a physical boxed release! I ordered mine (standard box version for EUR49,99) and it arrived in the post last week. Now I feel a bit dumb for not having played the original Settlers yet!

Settlers 2 was released on PC back in 1996, with no release for Amiga. I never had or played the PC version.

Thanks to the efforts of some amazing coders, and using some of the more recent tools like AGABlaster for CDXL conversion of the videos included in the original, we have a version for Amiga that works on classic Amiga 030/040/060 as well as AmigaOS4 based PowerPC systems.

The system requirements are on the side of the physical box release, as shown above.

Included in the box is some postcards, DVD, and game manuals.

Here is the back of the game box:

No complaints about the physical box release itself - I like it a lot. Good quality box and manuals are also printed on decent glossy paper.

The included DVD though is a problem for most Amiga owners, since they likely don't have a DVD drive connected to their system. For purchasers of the game, you also get a digital download lha archive, which at 1.3GB is a massive amount of data to transfer to a Classic Amiga!

Luckily for me I have USB sticks and my network QNAP to make this easier.

That said, it took hours to transfer the 1.3GB lha file to my Amiga 4000T/060 system, and even longer to extract it. 

The main reason the archive is so huge is the CDXL video files in the game, which (as I covered with creating CDXL files in my blog here) are huge files. The need to support German, French, English and Polish versions of the video files leads to the large size and the need for the DVD.

Personally, I would have made four standard CD's with each language on a seperate disc to solve this....that way the game would work out of the box on more Amiga systems...most people will need to use the digital lha archive, or manually copy the files from a PC/Mac with a DVD drive to USB stick or network share to transfer.

Since there is also a PowerPC AmigaOS 4 version included, I first copied the digital lha archive to my AmigaOne A1222 system first, since I knew it would be much faster to copy and extract there.

Note also that the installer requires a Settlers2: assign to the drawer where you extract the Settlers 2 lha digital archive. If you don't assign this before running the installer, it will fail.

You can choose the video quality, low, medium or high. High is CDXL and required AGA since it uses the AGABlaster program to work.

Installed on the A1222 and ready to launch.

Settlers 2 looks great on the A1222.

It also runs perfectly at the maximum 1024x768 resolution, although I should note that the screen upscaling it to fit 1920x1080p Workbench RTG screen means it is a bit perspective incorrect.

Pity the menu screen background is in German for some reason, but the rest of the menu and game is in English.

Settlers 2 is a campaign based city building game with real time strategy elements.

As the 1st campaign opens, you need to build some houses for wood cutter, stonemason and carpenter. You also need to build roads to connect these houses to the main Headquarters building, which is the only building on the map to start with.

Settlers 2 using the RTG screen to use the full colours means the game screen looks glorious.

It feels strange that we have these older late 1990's games like Settlers 2, Quake 2, Heretic 2, Starcraft and many others too on the Amiga in recent years. 

I am of course happy we have them in 2025, but really wish we had them back in the late 1990's when these games were released, when more people would have enjoyed playing them, and kept the Amiga going, at a time when Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000T systems were still being made by Amiga Technologies. 

We had RTG graphics cards for our Amiga systems back then too thanks to Picasso II, IV, Cybergraphics, BVision PPC, etc. 

If these expansions had been included with the A1200/A4000 systems being sold in 1995-1997 it would have helped a lot.

And yes, I know, by this time there was only a small number of remaining Amiga owners to buy the games. I understand the economics and the reason companies abandoned the Amiga after the fall of Commodore in 1994, even with Amiga Technologies making the systems again from 1995-1997. 

I am just pointing out that the hardware expansions available at the time were actually capable of playing the modern PC games of the era. These releases for Amiga in recent years prove that. It was my frustration at the time. 

The cost of the hardware upgrades was simply out of reach for many Amiga owners, and with so few owning the required hardware, and Windows 95 PC systems affordable and with a lot more new release games, it was difficult to resist moving to it.

Back then, I remember buying Gloom Deluxe and Genetic Species for Amiga as we didn't have Doom or Quake for the Amiga at that time. Both excellent 3D doom style games.

I also remember buying Foundation for Amiga, which is a real time strategy game in the same mould as Settlers 2, and it used the RTG support on the Amiga well. 

It was nice to see the Amiga still got games of this quality in the late 1990's, even though the mainstream publishers had mostly abandoned the Amiga by then. I want to shine a light on some of these releases in the future,  for people who missed them back in the day.

Anyway, back to Settlers 2!

Time to read the manual. I have no idea how to get started!

You can switch to another view pressing the space bar, that shows all the different types of buildings you can build on the land.

You need to select where a house icon is shown on the map, as this is where houses can be built on the land. A blue flag appears in front of the house to be constructed.

I then need to build the road to connect the new house to the headquarters. This allows the workers from the headquarters to navigate the map to the new house location to begin construction.

Removing the overlay view makes the map much easier to work with:

The houses are now being built:

With the required initial three houses built, the woodworker, and stone mason get to work collecting the resources needed for future buildings.

Next I needed to build a house for a forester:

So I picked a spot, connected a road, and the construction was soon underway:

Next up we are told to build a barracks near the northern border of our land, which will extend our region of control further into the map.

I also planted a flag to send a geologist out to search the hills for more resources to mine.

As you can imagine, there is a lot to this game, and way more than I can cover here in this blog post.

Settlers 2 looks like a lot of fun, and I look forward to playing it more over the coming weeks.

I know I have barely scratched the surface, with military, fishing, water collection, mining and much more yet to explore.

The game looks amazing, and I wish now I had played Settlers 1!

At this point, the Amiga 4000T had finally copied the lha digital archive for Settlers 2 across, so I extracted it and waited a few more hours for that, and went and had some dinner!

I came back when done, and started the installation of Settlers 2:

For the Amiga 4000T, I selected the 060 version, with AGA (high quality) CDXL videos:

As an aside I also got a Jaz drive working on the Amiga 4000T - you can see it in the background of the photo above. I plan to write a blog post about that too. That is why there is a mess of SCSI cables sitting on top of the SCSI scanner on the left side also...

While waiting for the installation to complete, I got a little distracted playing another 2025 new release game for Amiga, called Blok by Zooperdan. This is a lot of fun too. Well worth getting if you don't have it yet.

Blok is an isometric 3d puzzle game to get a 2x1 block to the end of each level. It is not as easy as it sounds. You need to  roll the blok horizontally or vertically to move it across the level, with gaps, switches and time sensitive pads all there to make things harder!

No part of the block can go outside the tiles of the level. If there is a gap, there is a switch or pad that will permanently or with a time restriction bridge it.

I have to say, I really enjoyed it. Not every game needs super fancy graphics to be fun to play - that said, I like the graphics used in this game.

I got to level 9 of Blok when the Settlers 2 install finished. Good fun game. I hope Blok gets a physical box release with extra levels - I would love to get it.

I could now launch Settlers 2 on Amiga 4000T, and much to my happiness, it looks much nicer on the perspective correct screen:

Actually, I have to say I enjoyed it more on the Amiga 4000T, even though it does run a bit slower, and the mouse clicking seems less accurate, requiring multiple clicks on icons to make things happen in game.

The speed of the game is ok though, more than playable.

Thanks to the RTG display of the ZZ9000 card in my Amiga 4000T, it looks just as good as it does on the A1222. You can read more about that great modern ZZ9000 RTG card in my build here on Amiga 2000, and the Amiga 4000T build here, and A4000T build part 2 here.

The iPhone does a crap job of showing the screen when photos resize to fit this blog post. If you click/touch on the photos in this post you can view the detail much better.

As with the AmigaOS4 version, you can save your game progress via the main game menu, and set it to auto save if you want to.

As mentioned, the game plays just as well on the Amiga 4000T 060 system too, although it does run a bit slower, and the mouse clicks are a bit slow to respond for some reason, requiring multiple or long clicks to work.

Settlers 2. On Amiga 060. Fantastic.

Blok on Amiga 500. Settlers 2 on Amiga 4000T. Which one to play? Decisions, decisions.

Do your Amiga a favour in 2025 and grab both games! They are both great fun and very different types of games.

You can also apparently run Settlers 2 on Pistorm and Vampire enabled Amiga systems too, though I have not tried this as yet.

There are even more new release physical box Amiga games I have also ordered this month, like Phantom Leap and Freak out. I also got Master of Minefields - I played the version on the K&A plus coverCD and I am hooked.  I look forward to trying these new games when they get here.

I already showed many other new 2025 release Amiga games in this blog post if you want to see more. 

It is so great to have so many new games for our Amiga systems in 2025, and more on the way! Personally, I am very excited to buy Grind when it eventually comes out - a Doom style game for a stock Amiga 500! Could you imagine if this game was released on Amiga 500 back in 1993? Would so many people have moved to PC then? I wonder...