Anno 2070 The year is 2070 and the world is no longer as we know it. The rising sea levels has reshaped out world, completely removing parts and making other unfertile land in to luscious green forests. This is the latest in the award-winning series and offers a brand new world full of challenges that need to be mastered in the most comprehensive Anno game yet.
The centre of conflict arises from two major competing factions, the Eden Initiative (Ecos) and the Global Trust (Tycoons). The Tycoons see the planet just as a pile of resources to be gathered and don’t care about what happens to the world, where as the Ecos are trying to alter humanity to become more eco-friendly to save what is left of the world.Across this new oceanic world you will need to settle, build homes, farms, mines and industry to provide for your people and to make some money trading.
Eventually you will need to expand your city’s and provide defences and naval forces to defend yourself, however war plays such a little part in this game the tutorial for this comes surprising late in to the game, after some real missions. The city building of the game is not as fluid and comprehensive as you might expect if you were new to the series, with some rather dull building and unimaginative buildings this really is not the strongpoint of the game.
But as all Anno players will know it never has been, the strongpoint in an Anno game is the economy, everything from farming and processing all the way to importing goods and selling them. For people that don’t know this economy is huge, instead of the usual buy low sell high, you are in the position to process the goods to increase their value, haul massive stocks of good and when the market crashes sell them off slowly at extortionate prices.
Your civilians are your only way of advancing to better structures, so controlling the population of your city is curtail to completing missions and getting though the game. This involves balancing the relation with each of the factions Despite how large and important the economic part of the game is, the developers have done a brilliant job of making it simple to use.
Even from the start with the simple yet informative displays you are not overwhelmed by all the information displayed. Nothing is hard to find with all the information where you would expect it to be. The learning curve is also shockingly low. For a game of this type I would expect a huge boring tutorial that left me more confused than anything else, however Anno has done the tutorial perfectly.
It is entertaining enough to keep you playing while covering all the aspects of the game at a steady pace. The tutorial also leads on to the actual campaign very well, introducing all the key factions and their different gameplay styles. The overall graphics of the game are shocking good for what I expected with some exceptional water graphics greatly lifting the overall look of the game as water covers a large proportion of the map. The sounds of the game complement the graphics well with only a few non fitting sounds or bad voice acting. Anno places a large emphasis on the online experience, so much that you have to be online to play.
This is Anno’s greatest feature and the biggest problem in the game. With the constant online connection and some clever designing by Ubisoft the game world is always changing with the community’s input. You are able to vote on what the factions should go affecting the gameplay for every user. The problem however is the Ubisoft game launcher, this constantly causes problem on more than one occasion I was completely unable to play the game as a result.
The combined with Ubisoft’s bad customer support caused me much anger. At one point after patching the game everything changed to German with no option to change it back after contacting Ubisoft they said the language won’t change you must reinstall the game for the same issue to happen again. They completely refused to believe this was happening to me it was only though the community that an fix was found. Overall this game is great for but covers a rather small middle ground between a city builder and a RTS game. But if you are looking for an economic game this is the one for you.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
