The simple pleasures of monetizing the final frontier.
By T.J. Hafer
Playing Anno 2205 made me feel like a high-powered CEO exploiting the wonders of the 23rd century… with a staff of thousands of ungrateful children. As I navigated three interesting and distinct biomes (temperate, polar, and lunar) to build my corporate empire, my growing pool of employees constantly badgered me about how they didn’t have enough bio-implants, or androids to wash their microchip-embedded windbreaker jackets. Keeping them happy and creating a supply chain that spanned from the Earth to the moon would net me a surge in profits, which is a good old-fashioned capitalistic rush, but there’s not much of a story or endgame beyond a full bank account and silencing the nagging.
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Anno gives you more to think about than the standard, “Police, Hospitals, Fire, Schools, Done!” routine.
Employee housing and happiness are the core metrics of success in Anno 2205, but Anno’s long-running formula plays out a little differently than a standard city-builder due to the huge number of consumer goods you will eventually need to manufacture to satisfy your employees. Low-tier wage slaves who have all their humble needs met (food, water, medicine) can be upgraded to Operators, Executives, and eventually Investors, but while higher rollers provide you with more income, each tier also demands fancier food, gizmos, and other extravagances made possible by the high-tech industries you develop over the course of a campaign. This gives you more to think about than the standard, “Police, Hospitals, Fire, Schools, Done!” routine of a game like SimCity or Cities Skylines, and it’s fun to work out how all the pieces fit together.
Simultaneously operating colonies in Anno’s three biomes is the coolest element of its simulation. I began in the familiar setting of Earth’s shrinking temperate zone, where things are pretty standard for an Anno game: I needed to build houses, clear land for farms, mine minerals, purify water, and generate power. Things got interesting when I expanded to a totally new map in the Arctic, where all dwellings needed to be placed near a heat source to be habitable. In the late game I took my operation to the lunar surface, where I had to erect expensive shield generators over all of my in-use areas to protect my infrastructure from constant showers of space debris. The unique challenges of each zone made me think differently, and I enjoyed the variation in aesthetics as I switched between them using the overworld map. It’s almost like getting three, smaller city-builders for the price of one.
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The visual style of each area is distinct and iconic. Soaring, clean lines of skyscrapers in the temperate zone contrast with minimalist science outposts in the Arctic, and rugged, utilitarian factories and domiciles on the lunar surface. Zooming in allows you to see jet-setting execs swooping around in flying cars, parka-clad fishermen and dockworkers farming the frigid seas, and moon rovers bustling between monolithic mining drills and sprawling power plants. The issue is that there isn’t a lot of variety within each zone — every robot factory looks the same, and if you’ve seen one block of temperate megaplex housing, you’ve seen them all. I also noticed some pretty severe graphical optimization issues in certain camera modes, even at sub-maximum settings and running on a Core i7 and a GeForce GTX 770 that exceeds Ubisoft’s recommended specs and eats games like Total War: Attila for breakfast. It’s choppy, but playable.
The late-game synergies between the Arctic, the temperate zone, and the moon base made me almost giddy.
Though I bemoan the neediness of my workforce, the late-game synergies that can be created by transporting raw materials from the Arctic, finished goods from the temperate zone, and massive amounts of fusion power from my moon base made me almost giddy. I hit a point where I felt like I was managing three, interdependent ecosystems that become far more than the sums of their parts by working together. Late-game products, like personal androids, require materials and manufactured items from all three areas, but give a correspondingly huge boost to happiness.
It’s just too bad that the ultimate culmination of that interdependence is that my greedy investors could get faster quantum computers on which to play a hundred simultaneous games of holographic scrabble, rather than an achievement I can build and see. The cities themselves aren’t varied enough in their architectural styles to get that, “Look at this cool ant farm I built” feeling like you might with another city builder, so I ended up feeling like seeing bigger numbers on my balance sheet was the only impetus for expansion. It would have been nice to have something greater to work towards, such as exporting my wondrous products for the betterment of mankind. Once my profits hit critical mass and I had more money than I knew what to do with, having far eclipsed all my corporate rivals and finished all the campaign goals, my only expansion options involved placing more identical buildings to rake in even more ridiculous amounts of cash… entirely for its own sake.
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The only other thing to do is gather necessary commodities, termed “rare” resources, that can only be obtained by actively seeking them out and collecting them. One way to do this is through on-map quests involving your personal yacht or lunar rover, which almost all amount to either fetch quests or maintaining a certain level of production of a specific good for a certain amount of time. The other way is by running combat missions, a mediocre, watered-down RTS minigame that lets you control a small, upgradeable fleet of ships. Anno seems to want to make combat missions and quests optional for city planning purists, but at the same time, it withholds upgrades needed for an optimal business model for doing so.
The story is a poorly written comic book with clear “good guys” and “bad guys,” and no real sense of closure.
The campaign features a story, but it serves as very little beyond a missed opportunity. Some disgruntled, bald, goateed man descended from an earlier wave of lunar colonization is committing acts of terrorism to lobby for the moon’s independence from Earth’s governments and corporations, so you blow up a lot of his stuff in scripted combat missions. Eventually, you “defeat” him by becoming such a profitable corporation that, I guess, he decides it’s not a good idea to challenge you anymore. It could have been an interesting, unfolding plot with morally gray choices to make about how to handle the lunar “natives.” Instead, it’s a poorly written comic book with clear “good guys” and “bad guys,” and no real sense of closure.
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You’re also pitted against a number of other corporations, but there is no real sense of competition. They can’t sabotage you or undercut your prices in a certain market, and you are equally impotent to act against them. They will sometimes offer you bribes for voting with them in a council that can affect prices of certain items, but ultimately remain unimportant to your corp’s operations — becoming even less so after you eclipse them in size and profits.
Anno 2205 is an engaging and strategic city builder with unique challenges in each of its attractive biomes. But ultimately, it manifests as a never-ending treadmill of trying to supply the picky, luxury-loving consumers of the 23rd century with more techno-garbage. The combat missions and side quests aren’t that in-depth or entertaining, and the story is half-baked and full of stock characters. The truest moments of joy it offers are connecting up cross-biome production lines and watching your profits soar. I just wish there was something more meaningful to put those profits toward.
