My only complaint in that regard is that the futuristic buildings seem too blandly similar. The graphics and sound assets combine to make you feel like you are working for a sterile, slightly pleasant mega-corporation it feels sort of like Apple hired you to colonize the moon for them. The presentation is pretty impressive: I didn’t run into any bugs during my playthrough. But the challenge of it was sort of the point in the first place.
It’s a move that kind of feels like removing the bullets from the bad guys’ guns in an FPS. Instead of buying boats and setting up complicated routes to drop off and pick up goods across your empire, Anno 2205 essentially beams goods back and forth between settlements. A 20-second pause might not seem like much, but when you are running into one every minute or so, it adds up.Īlso, the game does away with any real planning of your trade routes. If you need to increase production on one product, that usually means having to bounce between sectors and make changes to every resource that goes into that product. For me, Anno has always been a game about jumping around and making little tweaks to keep things running smoothly. That might sound minor, but it really ended up killing the pace of the gameplay for me. However, switching between sectors is a pain, each requiring a slight loading time that would often turn to long lags on my machine.
The sectors are pretty interesting- the three different regions really do play differently and are challenging enough to hit that sweet spot between enjoyably frustrating and rage-inducing. You can still freely claim islands within a sector, but since all the islands on a map shares the same resources, you only really do so when you need more space to build. Instead of just settling in these sectors whenever you like, you now have to hit milestones to unlock them in a pseudo-campaign approach. You’ll likely be using your other two colonies to subsidize your moon-moochers. Everything needs to be built under fancy energy shields to keep from getting panicked.
If your colonists aren’t getting figuratively crushed by the high cost of building and maintenance, they still risk getting literally crushed by meteor strikes. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.