Anno 2205 Review

If you’ve ever left the water running while you brushed your teeth, turned up the heating in Winter instead of putting on a jumper or washed your clothes at 40 rather than 30 then I want you to take some time out and think about what you’ve done. Because you’ve caused Anno 2205.

The city-builder series has decided to take a leap forward in time from 2070 to the far flung future, in which global warming has left the Earth covered with water and humankind struggling to survive on the archipelago left over from what was presumably the Alps, Himalayas, Rockies and Carpathians. Despite royally screwing up the planet, we as a race have managed to hold on to our technological abilities and it's up to the player to help rebuild society.

How will you go about saving humanity? By building a fusion reactor on the Moon, naturally. Before you can get to that incredible feat of engineering, though, you’ll need to choose from two competing corporations (it’s always corporations in sci-fi, isn’t it?) and build up a futuristic city to support such an endeavour.

Construction in the game will be familiar to most players of city-builders. You drag and drop roads, houses, factories et al. from a list menu onto suitable pieces of terrain and watch them grow. Anno 2205 goes about the prospect of building on tiny islands in an inventive way, though: you can tack additions, modules and stat-boosting extras to your buildings, making them grow naturally like a sprawling dyst- err, I mean utopian, city. A welcome sight for cack-handed builders like yours truly is the ability to reposition elements after they’ve been placed.

The game unlocks larger constructions later on that can take you to brand new environments including the arctic and the Moon itself. These larger ambitions must be met with increased resources, however, and often times the player will find themselves waiting, F2P mobile game-like, to accrue the right amount. Anno 2205 does a fairly good job of noticing when you might be twiddling your thumbs, however, and will chuck some side mission your way to pass the time.

These missions can come in multiple forms but more often than not entail disrupting and destroying some terrorist cell somewhere as they hatch a dastardly scheme to destroy climate regulation tech or blow up supply lines. While you're away your resources will tick up, allowing those larger projects when you get back.

It’s about there that the challenge the game presents ends abruptly. Resources are infinite and will constantly build (unless you really mess up), enabling almost any city to stay stable and sustainable. Time and time again the strategy of just building a tonne of houses, then factories, then upgrading both, won me all I needed. This simplicity is not what RTS players want from a game, while the ease of building left the city-builder in me scratching his head for what to do next.

Combat in the game is fairly shallow and involves simply gathering as many missiles, mines and support ships as possible and then sending them into battle.It was rare that I encountered an enemy that gave me pause, let alone made me think tactically.

Perhaps Anno 2205’s one saving grace is its graphics - it’s a gorgeous-looking game at times, with the sun shining off of the water and reflecting the curves of your buildings and ships with faithful and attractive accuracy. The water ripples and froths behind vehicles, splashes satisfyingly with gun bursts and flows believable around the various map’s islands. Even here, however, the game has issues. Frame-rate drops were common on settings that should have run the game comfortably on my machine, while load times often left me checking my watch.

Playing Anno 2205 gives one the feeling that something is missing, like a half-written novel or a song containing only the chorus. The series has leapt far into the future in an obvious attempt to reinvent its mechanics and come out worse for it. The possibilities of the setting are barely scratched upon, while the city-building, as competent as it is on the surface, leaves a lot to be desired for challenge. Anno 2205 is a game a mile wide and an inch deep, and one that fans of the series should probably avoid.