Anno 1800 Review

I’ll admit, I haven’t played a city-builder type game in a long time, but when I had the opportunity to take a look at Anno 1800, I jumped at the chance to review the game. Anno 1800 is Blue Byte’s seventh release in the Anno series and I’m glad they decided to go back to a time where it was more about hard work than about technology.

The main crux of any city builder is finding that delicate balancing of your resources and production output. Have too many buildings and your maintenance costs can outweigh your income, making it impossible to grow. Too many workers and you have bored individuals not contributing to the growth of the city. Fortunately, there are alternate ways to acquire resources not readily available. Once you have maximized the output using resources on your starting island, you can search the seas for additional resources on other islands. These islands may have different soil that can be used to create new raw materials not currently available to you.

Once you’ve established yourself in Anno 1800, you can expand further by creating trade routes with other AI players, each having their own unique personalities and occasional quests for you to complete. Trading becomes more important as you progress, allowing you to quickly move resources. Diplomacy ties in with the trading and can make it extremely difficult when you need resources from a player you have angered by not assisting when called to help.

Expeditions are a new feature in Anno 1800 and allow you to send your ships to the New World in South America. Here you can establish new colonies, interact with other factions, and share your new resources among all of your colonies.

The graphics in Anno 1800 are gorgeous. Using a zoomed out global view, the world looks stunning from the mountains and terrain to the open seas surrounding your island. Zooming in, I found the world equally delightful. Houses look similar but didn’t seem to be all cookie cutter designs. The water also looks good and as you move across seas on the map, you notice various wildlife including flocks of birds and various whale pods including Orcas and Humpbacks.

Anno 1800 Review Final Thoughts:

Anno 1800 is a slick city-builder that is quite enjoyable once you learn the best way to develop your colony’s economy. The added Expeditions feature and New World to explore can provide a temporary distraction from the grind of city development, but also provide additional value to the game. Anno 1800 is available on the Epic Store and Uplay for $59.99.