Anno 2205 Review (PC)

Anno 2205 is one of the most optimistic video games about the far future of humanity I have played recently, a mix of classic city building and strategy that is built on the idea that our brightest minds and our best entrepreneurs will work together to solve the problems that currently plague us.

The new video game from Ubisoft is clearly created by optimists and it's eager to show gamers how complex and engaging city planning and supply chain management can be when a player needs to coordinate his moves between various settlements with different priorities.

Anno 2205 does not have the citizen focus of Cities: Skylines and can sometimes feel a little artificial when it comes to mechanics, but the development team introduces a lot of innovation to the classic mechanics of the series, and fans will be happy with the result for the most part.

Story

Anno 2205 is a clear sign that the long-running city builder created by Ubisoft is no longer interested in the past of humanity and instead wants to explore the challenges of the future and show gamers how the major crisis of our time might be solved via careful use of technology and solid application of city management principles.

Despite the success that fans might have had with the previous installment, Anno 2070, Earth is no longer a resource-heavy planet because humanity trends to consume a little too much too fast, so our entire civilization needs to find new ways to optimize production and to find new sources that can offer long-term relief.

The answer is to go not to Mars or extrasolar planets, as many science fiction writers and fans believe, but to colonize and exploit the Moon, creating a dual system that allows the two bodies to trade a variety of goods and to basically allow each other to grow and thrive.

Anno 2205 bird's eye view

Players start off Anno 2205 by creating a new company that is able to take part in the race to create settlements on the satellite, and over the course of the campaign, they will have to manage a variety of locations in order to create extensive, efficient and stable cities and colonies.

Gamers will have to deal with a villain, and there are characters and dialogues that reveal the next steps gamers need to take, and the way groups seek to oppose the colonization of the Moon, but the story of the new Anno is mostly forgettable and just a pretext to move gamers from one environment to another and to deliver challenges.

Gameplay

Anno 2205 remains a city builder at its core, but this installment is clearly designed to make the main mechanics more accessible and to deliver a range of real-time strategy moments and some enhanced economic concepts in order keep the action fresh and varied.

The development team has made it easy to create a layout, put down houses and then set up farms, mines and manufacturing centers to deal with the various missions that the game generates.

Population, energy use, and transport capacity all need to be taken into account while expanding a city and there are some moments when money also becomes an issue, although a slowdown in the pace of development is usually enough to balance the checkbook.

Initially, the game feels a little too familiar as gamers take over a temperate region that poses a limited set of challenges and forces gamers to go into a combat mission to progress.

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The real-time strategy aspect of Anno 2205, which involves fleets of ships and use of powerful special abilities linked to fuel, is a good way to get access to resources but fails to be engaging in any way because almost no tactics are required to reach the objectives.

The worst part is that Ubisoft uses these sequences to limit player progress and playing through them is easier than getting a company rank that offers an alternative path.

Once a temperate city thrives gamers will move to the Arctic, which is still very cold despite the effects of global warming, and the new region comes with new gameplay challenges.

The idea is to get access to minerals that are not offered anywhere else, and that involves dealing with the freezing temperatures, which means that gamers need to generate heat by creating settlements where homes cluster around industry, which fails the aesthetics test but passes the efficiency one.

On the Moon, the environment is even harsher, and gamers will have to carefully create shields to make sure that meteorite showers do not destroy the budding colony while it searches for resources to sustain itself and for the special Helium-3 that can bring a lot of energy for Earth.

“As the cities set in the various environments evolve, gamers need to establish trade between them while finding space to expand and money to fund the increasingly expensive industry branches required to supply new types of goods.”

One big innovation is the ability to simply move any building without penalties, something that will appeal to newcomers but might make the game a little too easy for long-term fans, who are accustomed to creative destruction in their city builders.

For each mine, farm and factory, gamers can also use modules to boost production and limit energy and manpower costs, and their use becomes very important as more citizens arrive and more goods need to be created.

The new mechanic means some space should be reserved near any kind of industry to avoid some annoying movement and re-building.

Anno 2205 manages to be very exciting during the early and the middle game for each of the plots the player can colonize, but after a certain amount of tweaking the title becomes relatively boring.

Gamers have to move around a lot of buildings and carefully optimize resource and product chains, which fails to be exciting even when playing on the Moon, the most alien of the environments.

Graphics and audio

Anno 2205 does look great, with a lot of variety between the various areas and designs for both buildings and units that manage to convey the futurism that dominates the game and the idea that this is a utopia waiting to be realized.

Because there are plenty of slow moments, especially once all cities are set up and run almost by themselves, gamers will have a lot of time to zoom in and appreciate the clean lines of the buildings, the hardiness of the lunar outposts and the way Arctic towns seem both remote and a little devoid of life even when operating at peak capacity.

The voice acting is adequate, although I suspect a small number of people will care about it because of how flimsy the story is, and the music manages to convey the idea of a future where mankind is ready to triumph over any challenge through science and good management.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion