Game review: Anno 2205

Anno 2205

Anno 2205 gives a glimpse of the future, where your entire life is based around making money for the conglomerate that owns you and rebels are crushed like annoying flies.

It is a city building game, but to differentiate itself from Cities: Skylines and Simcity, this one is set in the future and features a bit of warmongering and three different terrains to master through the course of one game.

The terrains Temperate, Arctic and Lunar each have their own challenges. Some seem logical, like the moon for example needs you to build shields around the base to protect your resources from meteor damage. Others seem stupid. Why would heat only come from factories in the arctic base? But the game won't really move forward unless you help your colony progress by creating and sending the resources required from one zone to the next.

The game has you at the reigns of a fledgling corporation and you have to grow it till you own everything. The object of the game here, unlike other City Building games, is to make profit. The citizens of your town don't matter and by the end of the game you are guaranteed to feel like the head of an evil corporation. Unfortunately this isn't as fun as it sounds.

Once you finish the main mission storyline, which will get you free power from the moon, there isn't much to do. Just wait around till you make a profit, juggling the wants of people with the lack of resources. There is no big pay off other than the joy of managing your cities and listening to your spoilt employees whine about how they don't have luxury food to eat or a stadium for entertainment.

Even the war elements are a bit of a cop out, they could have made it so much more. Instead, you maneuver a set bunch of vehicles/ships to take out unwanted rebels. They don't even bother to make the rebels sound like they are bad people.

Instead, the rebels just seem to be fighting evil corporations, trying to prevent them from pillaging their backyard.

We would totally love it if there was a base/army building element to the fighting levels, sort of a Real-time strategy, it would have bumped up the replayability. On the plus side the game looks great, it seems to handle the big maps with ease even when you have build a ton of stuff.

Additionally, the combat bits are just stupid. Despite these flaws, the game is cheap and may still be worth trying out for hardcore city building fans.

Anno 2205
Rating: 2/5
Developer: Blue Byte
Publisher: Ubisoft
Platform: PC
Price: Rs 999