![]() ![]() Not so much with people, though, who don’t even attempt to lip-synch to what they’re saying. It’s spoiled a little by some rampant texture popping when you zoom in or move to a new area, but it’s still a gorgeous game in places. The sun breaks over nearby hills, rain batters your farms and fields, wildlife ducks and weaves between forests and over meadows, and the wonderful ambient sound brings it all to life. Reaching the giddy heights of “city status” isn’t so easy, it turns out, and it’s nice to be rewarded for your efforts. ![]() You can reskin your buildings and vehicles for an extra personal touch, while the units themselves will change as you upgrade them. You can zoom right down to street level (though you can’t get right into the streets like you can in the PC version) and watch people go about their little pre-programmed routes. ![]() Whatever you’re doing though, Anno 1800 looks amazing. The more you play the more you’ll spot areas for improvement, and 5 or 6 hours in you’ll be looking back at your early efforts scratching your head at what you must have been thinking. Slapping things down higgledy-piggledy won’t get you far, and demolishing things also has a cost. You don’t have direct control over the landscape, but you will need to position your buildings in such a way that they have access to roads factories need to be in range of warehouses, while homes need access to pubs, churches, and marketplaces. Completing these is essential to progress, and some of them are as simple as maintaining a minimum stock, while others require you to move around the ever-expanding map to gather items or even stop riots. Icons will appear above buildings that need your attention, and supporting characters will come into the picture throughout the story to offer main and side quests. Quite often there’s nothing going on at the ground level, which is when you can focus more on the bigger picture. Manufacturing, but also housing and diplomacy – something that Anno does well but not as in-depth as some games in the genre – it can become daunting. Once you have to start juggling not only trade routes and It’s at this point that Anno 1800 does begin to get tougher to manage. You can instruct your warehouses to maintain a minimum stock of certain items, but you’ll be managing each factory and farm down to the workers, pausing them for maintenance and striving to erect more homes to attract more potential grafters. There’s a focus on resource gathering and management, but also on establishing trade routes for the things you can’t easily produce. See, you start off with small farmer residences and dirt roads, progressing through warehouses, Union buildings, massive churches, schools, zoos, and cobbled streets. But as with all good city-building sims, each playthrough will see you lasting just that little longer and being just that little bit more efficient. It’s not easy for your city to utterly collapse, and often failure will creep up on you slowly. And you do this by building a huge industrial empire that utterly eclipses his own.Īnno 1800 Console Edition has many fail states. Your mission, whether you choose to accept it or not, is to prove him wrong. It’s not just that he hates you, but rather that he also believes you’re about as intelligent as a wedge of old cheese. The story sees you returning from exile after the death of your father, to find that your brother has become a completely evil despot who regards you in much the same way as people regard that pigeon in Trafalgar Square that has one wing and walks in circles. Or you can jump right into the sandbox mode straight away, you mad bastard. It also has a full, 20-hour story campaign that leads you through all the steps involved in creating a metropolis of your own before letting you loose in the sandbox mode. This is the seventh iteration of the Anno series, and Ubisoft have returned to the Victorian-era setting that made the franchise so popular, eschewing any modern or sci-fi trappings. You can still fail, you’ll still find pockets of resistance who for some unknown reason aren’t happy to chop logs or mine copper until their limbs drop off, but by and large Anno 1800 has a somewhat relaxed approach to the challenges of government. But the point I’m vaguely meandering towards is that Ubisoft has managed to make the pressures of building and maintaining a strong community fairly stress-free. In all fairness, I’m over simplifying Anno 1800 a bit. People are overworked? Back to the pub again. Poverty, civil unrest, a shortage of wooden logs, but ultimately it’s not something a quick reload – or failing that, a complete re-do – can’t fix. I mean, there are challenges to overcome, of course. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from games like Anno 1800 Console Edition, it’s that building a thriving industrial city is a piece of piss.
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