Anno 117: Pax Romana Review

As I look over my multitude of settled islands across Latium and Albion, I smile. Meeting the needs of the Empire’s Roman and Celtic subjects requires keen attention. The sprawling growth of well-governed cities now looks like art to me. These civilisations I have painted into being with my cursor are nothing short of beautiful. I have tirelessly sourced specific foods, luxuries and services to bring this advanced, ancient empire to life. 

Ubisoft Mainz’s premiere city builder returns after switching settings from the 19th-century industrial revolution to the golden age of the Roman Empire. Anno 117: Pax Romana builds upon the strong bones of Anno 1800, copying over the best parts of that game’s interface, systems, and approachability. Whether a series newcomer (like me) or returning player, Anno 117 introduces players to their Roman and Celtic corners of the world with a relatively slow and steady start. 

In both the campaign and the sandbox modes, players begin with a humble coastal trading post. Then, it’s a matter of laying down some dirt roads headed inland from that dock. Click and drag out a few rows of houses, and now our civilisation engine is off and running. To attract more citizens to those homes, it’s a matter of supplying the goods and services that will sustain them. A click on any given house will clearly indicate what its people need and if they are in proximity to its supply. What reads as a bit dry and logistical on paper comes to life on screen in a grand scale. Gradually. This cycle of expansion will give players a clear direction on how to grow their settlements in the early hours. Before long, an island is full to bursting with people and industry, but expansion beckons. If there are no more unoccupied islands to develop, the insatiable need to grow can see players turn to land and sea warfare.

Laying siege to an opponent is a costly affair that won’t always work out

Perhaps the most notable new addition in Anno 117 is the series’ return to ground-based combat. Anyone who has played any big-name real-time strategy games from 2000 onward will be quick to understand the nuance of how fights play out. Most players will start with a barracks, maybe some archers and pikemen. Later, cavalry and catapults. Whack a cluster together, chuck them on some triremes, and send them to war on foreign soil. Players can macro-bind their armies, meaningfully upgrade units via research trees, change formations and garrison them on home soil. It’s all very Age of Empires adjacent, for those that are into that. As a city builder, Anno 117 feels best suited to a chill time, developing trade routes and farm layouts. If the RTS flavour is off-putting, know that it is not especially complex nor fast-paced. You will be forced to interface with this game’s combat systems, but they are not demanding of a quick hand or exhaustive attention.

Prefer the gentler, diplomatic route? Well, diplomacy ain’t shit if you’ve not got the forces to back up your stake. Fortunately, this is a robust lesson taught in the trenches of the campaign’s more conflict-focused second act. Some coin in the right pockets goes a long way, but you won’t effectively see the end of this section of the game without amassing military might. Each unit is a functional army unto itself, devouring a village’s worth of resources. You will feel the weight of warfare in Anno 117, despite any efforts to maintain peace. 

Interacting with the other governors across Anno 117’s two provinces is compelling from a systems perspective, but the attempts at storytelling and dialogue are fraught with issues. Enemy AI will regard you with respect when you are perceived as a threat, and will attempt to bully you if you’re not at least in tight with another ruler. Talking heads conversations and pop-ups with these other governors will frequently occur. Strangely, they all have poorly edited line delivery that is consistently cut too quickly. This results in a jarring lack of breath between dramatic, punctuated statements, mashing lines together with no tonal flow. There are also attempts at lip syncing. Other times, not at all, just a breathing person staring intently at you while their voice lines chase after one another.

The characters have a dimension, or two. Diana is forever melodramatic. 

The trade route system is an improvement on Anno 1800’s

With the second act set in exile in Albion, you can decide whether your citizens are culturally native (Celts) or Roman. You can even mix. The game warns of consequences regarding how particular characters will respond to your decisions here. I never saw any meaningful attempt at a narrative complication develop from these warnings. Throughout the course of the game’s 25-odd-hour campaign, the many hints at a story developing based on decisions such as these are never realised. The story I pointed to in my preview just wraps suddenly and awkwardly. I didn’t even realise the campaign had officially concluded before it had already seamlessly transitioned me to sandbox mode for hours already. At first, I thought it was a bug because the last mission failed incorrectly. Then, I couldn’t find any further campaign milestones or objectives. The story ran out of steam just as it was starting.

My humble Juliana has come a long way since the preview

This misfire of a story is a shame, as the setting is otherwise well-realised. Albion, in particular, is given a sense of untamed wildness. The sparse swamps and changing terrain look sublime when cast in storms. As the weather turns and winds whip through the hills, the shadows of cloud cover move over the paddocks painted in barley and hemp farms. While it may not look real, the graphical fidelity and sense of scale impress nonetheless. Yet, I think that the soundscape is the surprise star of all this, carrying tremendous depth on a good set of cans. All this on the default sound mix, which blends dramatically with the otherwise calm soundtrack. Anno 117 is an audiovisual lullaby that saw me entranced deep into the hours of the evening. 

Technical performance leaves something to be desired on PC. The scale of this game doubles the regions being simulated. Two separate, immaculately detailed archipelagos are now playing out in real time. As a result, expect long initial load times, pauses when switching provinces, and locking up menus. The gears can grind to a slow, if not a complete stop, at their very worst. If you keep pumping in commands when the game is getting too busy, it will eventually just hang. However, I never encountered any crashes.

Much mention has been made of the sublime visuals. Just be sure to pan those horizons steadily, lest a busy city skyline cause the framerate to skip and stutter.

The people must have their theatre!

Sometimes notifications would pop up that wouldn’t activate. Hints would flag themselves, and when I would click for more info, the prompt would disappear altogether. Worse still, sometimes when a catastrophe occurred in a city, my advisor would tell me to go into the related menu to find further information, only for said menu to be empty. The worst are notifications about trade routes having errors, often only resolved by turning the route off and on again. The trade route system is an improvement on Anno 1800’s, whose interface I had to refer to YouTube to wrangle. While getting simple and complex routes started is much easier now, they still require a lot of wrestling, often reporting errors for the fun of it.

I also had my fair share of bugs to disrupt the peace. Missions that failed before my eyes despite fulfilling all objectives. Buildings that couldn’t be placed because my cities never cooled down after being attacked. Buildings that required specific locations, such as mountains or riverways, simply wouldn’t work on some islands, while the sound effects and interface suggested that they had been built and were functional. Sometimes buildings or roads can’t be placed because the game just decides you can’t, for no explainable reason. While so fundamentally similar to the previous game, I had hoped for more stability from the core systems that have been carried over to this entry.

Final Thoughts

Anno 117 is a funny one to critique as a newcomer. I am in awe of the scale of engine management the game allows the player to puppeteer, particularly with trade and resource management. Ultimately, that’s not really where Anno 117’s greatest strengths lie, at least not for me. Rather, it’s a game of finding the fun in civics. Building road grids, filling those grids with homes and industry, and then watching it all blossom and bulge until there’s no option left but aggressive expansion. The hours will magically disappear as you craft great societies for your Roman and Celtic residents, and your city-building obsession is sure to outlast the whimpering footnote that is the campaign’s resolution.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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