The introduction is lengthy and a bit on the dragging side of things (and highlights the oddly cumbersome road-building tool), but it also is probably necessary given that this is an attempt to bring in players unfamiliar with the Anno series and the builder genre in general. They are nothing more than sprites laid over one another, but it comes together in a cohesive, quaint visual package that I really appreciate.Īnd it’s good there’s a lot to just stare at from the get-go-though you won’t immediately see all of its 120+ building types from the start-because it’s a slow burn. But the buildings and ships and everything are indeed charming. The interface is most like Anno 2070 but the visual milieu reminds me most of Dawn of Discovery, and if you’ve played The Settlers Online, it is perhaps most reminiscent of that but with a more deeply saturated color palette and textured veneer. First and foremost, Anno Online probably has the best presentation of the bunch, which is not surprising given the rest of the series. Well I can’t be sure if their plan will work in the long term, but I can tell you what they’ve done so far. It’s already a crowded market, so despite setting itself apart from the rest of the Anno games, you have to wonder how they plan on making it to the front of the pack with the rest of the Flash F2P runners. This puts it in direct competition with several other browser-based, free-to-play city-building games out there like Immortal Cities: Nile Online, Evony, and even Blue Byte’s own The Settlers Online. So if you want to write up some diatribe about more always-on video games, go ahead, but the trade-off here is that you can play it on pretty much any computer with Flash installed on it. Or more accurately, it’s Adobe Flash-based and you play it through a browser. That usually has some poor connotations on its own, but nothing egregious purchase-wise has jumped out at me yet ( yet). Actually, there are several kickers, so get your shin guards on.įirst off, it’s free-to-play. The kicker is that you’ll be doing it online with a bunch of other players. Luckily, though, Ubisoft and Blue Byte, publisher and developer of Anno Online respectively, have decided to rectify this injustice, so I took a key to their closed beta lock and took a look around.Īnno Online is an MMO still in the style of the traditional series, which is to say you’ll be building structures, managing populations, and optimizing economies from an isometric perspective. It was an interesting idea, if a tad poorly executed since it eventually limited you to what type of city you could build in addition to the size.
SimCity addressed that by putting your cities right up against other cities in a region, shoulder-to-shoulder sharing resources and traffic. You would sit and ponder this nonexistent, practically hypothetical world that only you could rummage about in, dreaming up and concocting situations to get yourself into and out of. Amongst the fleshy bodies of the world, you often seclude yourself to engage in digital entertainment, but the mental isolation was so much more taxing. It’s a rather isolating experience to play such games, both physically and mentally. It made me realize, though, that I really only had room in my life for roughly one city-builder video game a year, maybe less. And it was only through that unfortunate stigma that I finally got around to playing Anno 2070 after the entire SimCity always-online debacle when Ubisoft discounted it and every website and their mother (a newspaper? How does that work?) suggested other city-building alternatives.Īnd I really enjoyed it! It’s a fun game and has its own quirks, highlights and lowlights, but I definitely liked it enough to go back and play a few other franchise entries. More than that, I only knew it as “that SimCity-like game,” which I realize is totally unfair to the entire Anno series, but here we are. I definitely knew of the franchise but that was about it. Up until last year, I’d never played an Anno game.
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