Soon, however, the reason for this apparent simplicity became clear. I just wish someone would think of a new way to handle fire and crime in games, beyond the binary solution of “put this object down to make this thing not happen”.) This isn't even a complaint about the game, so much as the genre as a whole. (For all that praise, Anno 1800 still includes fire stations and police stations - my most hated mechanic in all city-builders - which must be plopped down at regular intervals in order to avoid the arbitrary chore of managing fires and riots. Interestingly, having these mechanics stripped away only made me realise how little I missed them. I didn’t even have to worry about unemployment - the game seem delighted for me to have as many surplus citizens as I wanted. Indeed, at first, the game feels like it’s had much of the genre’s usual complexity stripped away: as I laid out my starting settlement, I was surprised to find there was no need to devise public transport systems, or go through the usual rigmarole of making sure houses were near enough to workplaces to supply labour, while at the same time not being too near smelly or loud buildings that might upset the residents. Repeat until you’ve done the industrial revolution. That’s a fairly ambitious remit, but based on the first couple of hours of play, there’s really not much to separate the game from the generic city-builder experience: you put your resource-producing buildings down, you put your houses down to supply them with workers, and then you use what they make to create further, more complex resource production setups. Oh shit, Tolkien was talking about the class system, wasn't he? This is the grim satellite town where all the orcs live, leering sullenly at the gleaming city on the horizon. It starts with sawmills, sheep farms and schnapps, and ends with railways, electricity and champagne.
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The game tasks you with navigating the full range of social and technological changes experienced by Western Europe during the nineteenth century, via the twin media of depositing buildings on a map, and moving boats around (well, not the full range of social and technological changes, but I’ll get to that much later). Which is appropriate, because that’s pretty much what you play as in Anno 1800. In that sense, it’s a bit like a brooding moneylord from a nineteenth century novel. It very well might be, but I’m going to have to put in many more hours before I know whether its idiosyncrasies will make me fall hopelessly in love with it, or drive me away entirely.
But I’m going to stop just short of saying it’s the best city-builder I’ve ever played, because I’m not sure yet. I say that as a serious fan of the city-building genre, too. Folks, Anno 1800 is… a lot.īefore I get too heavily into the nuts and bolts, I’ll put it plainly: Anno 1800 is the most impressive city-builder I’ve ever come across. And around six hours later, like someone who’s seen a handful of wasps in their house and so decides to go up into the attic to try to find out why, I was forced to drastically re-evaluate my position. I had the feeling I’d seen the lion’s share of what there was to see, and was ready to pack up and write something along the lines of “great fun, but I’m not sure about replayability”. The issue was, I hadn’t realised I was playing the early game at all. After playing through Anno 1800’s early game a few times (I’m one of those ghastly bastards who tends to compulsively restart if things aren’t going exactly my way), I started writing a very different article to the one you are now reading.
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