Anno 117: Pax Romana Review
Anno 117: Pax Romana
Developer:Ubisoft Mainz
Publisher:Ubisoft
Platforms:PC,Playstation 5 (Reviewed),Xbox Series X|S
Release Date:Available Now
Price:$49.99 –Available Here
Overview
Annohas been kind of a back-burner franchise for Ubisoft, delivering a solid take on a city builder for those who get their kicks out of building a strong economy. The next installment has finally arrived and takes on Ancient Rome withAnno 117: Pax Romana. With a story mode campaign, co-op, and more polished features, does this release do enough to keep this franchise building upward, or is it one RTS to pass on as the market starts to pick up on consoles? Let’s find out.
Story
Players startAnno 117: Pax Romana in a time of peace, where the player takes the role as a new governor for a fresh civilization. There is actually a lot to this story. While most city-building titles thrive on general “war and politics” type stories,Pax Romana thrives in its campaign mode due to the decent narrative that layers over the basic “tutorial” styled gameplay. Players pick between a male and female character that have variations over the same plot, and must build up while making decisions to keep peace and fight off political drama as they progress.
While a lot of the decision making doesn’t effect the way the story plays out, it does contribute to how your game plays. Basically, there are two different provinces the player has the option to grow, Latium and Albion. Those who are working through Latium will mostly deal with economic challenges in a straight-forward growth sim. Albion is more of a challenge, dealing more with war on top of the standard experience. Add in the morale-heavy decision making of implementing Roman culture into semi-established provinces, and you have a surprisingly meaningful journey here that really does a lot to make the deep mechanics feel meaningful and interesting.
Gameplay
This is where the meat is, and a lot of players will probably want to hop into the standard sandbox, rather than play through the campaign, but despite either decision, there is a ton of depth and interesting mechanics to learn if you are new to this franchise. Players start with a ship, and must settle and begin building residences in a fresh province. As they build more, population grows, and that population has to be managed. Inhabitants automatically become workers, farmers, and so on, bringing about more upgrades as you build. Each new tech brings new perks that allow for further growth, and it really comes down to proper management after that.
Do you need to spend resources and space to add in techs that supply the land with fashion? Do you want to build a military early to conquer more, but also lose out on economic advancement early on? It is these kind of decisions that makeAnnotick here, and the Roman flavor simply gives it a unique style of its own. I spent countless hours on one island building, only to discover more land and basically start over as my strategies were required to change. There are a lot of those little “ah-ha” moments here where your thought process isn’t quite ready for the depth of the game, and then you must re-center your own personal desires of what your building to direct this world to a focus of your choosing. I could spend hours now just speaking of the massive amount of lore and strategies that open up in this title, but that will really come down to how the player handles their own experience.
I played the Playstation 5 version for this review, and my biggest concern was optimization. I loveAge of Empires, and even though the console versions are highly playable and continue to be optimized to this day, they still do not hold a candle to the PC versions in terms of actual meta. I don’t think Anno is like that. This version is well optimized, and even though mouse and keyboard is very ideal (and has been added as support for console ports), I felt like I got just as much as playing with a controller as everything was well mapped and easy to understand rather quickly.
Don’t get me wrong, the depth of the menus can get confusing and I had to take a lot of time simply trying to understand it all. That said, the campaign really does a good job of pacing out the mechanics where learning feels easy and satisfying, without feeling restrictive in any sort of manner. I do think solving random problems becomes overwhelming with just a controller. One task? Sure, not a problem. As you inhabit multiple islands however and start putting multitasking to work however – you might find it a bit tedious to juggle menu options quickly with the layout here. Luckily, the replay value with co-op and never-ending sandbox modes keep things constant, making it easy to lose hundreds of hours as you build the empire of your dreams.
Audio
I really liked the music here. I think with any city-builder, a solid, non-annoying soundtrack is important, and everything sounds pleasant and warm, allowing the player to feel cathartic as they drift on for hours during each session. The voice acting is also fine for campaign and beyond. Sure, some of it is a little cheesey in terms of delivery, but it does its job well enough to create some characters for the plot within.
Visuals
Probably the finest aspect ofAnno is the beauty of everything and how it comes together. These worlds look fantastic, featuring weather effects, stunning rivers and oceans, and detail from top to bottom. Add in the heavy amount of animation and things never really have a lot of slowdown or become a problem. I did see a few minor visual bugs later on, but they were not really intrusive and mainly had to do with icons over buildings not disappearing and so on, but even those issues were very far and few between. If I have to be critical of anything here, it would be the animations over voice acting. They don’t match. Maybe they did for another language, but it kind of caught me off-guard early on to see such a strong desync of animation to voices, so I think using still images would have been the way to go for those moments.
Overall
City building games on consoles are such a mixed bag, and I thinkAnno as a franchise has found a way to really optimize that experience to a more accessible degree compared to the other mainstays in the genre.Anno 117: Pax Romana isn’t perfect, but it is a solid entry in this franchise that has a lot of promise when it comes to adding this in-depth experiences to consoles. The gameplay is deep and addictive, and the presentation and performance is equally as pleasing. If you are looking for the most accessible way to hold Rome in the palms of your hands, this is a fantastic place to start.
Great 8 |
Anno 117: Pax Romana is a fantastic way to build up an empire on consoles. With deep, interesting gameplay and an engrossing layer of Roman lore, it's hard to not find a steady time sink in this RTS treasure. |
8 OUT OF 10 |
