Anno 2205 Reviews
Anno 2205 succeeds where many in the genre have failed in creating an interesting looking world that the player can care about. Experienced players of the city sim and strategy genres won't find anything new here, though, instead finding one of the most rudimentary offerings in terms of mechanics on the market today.
I've been addicted to 2205 all week, but remain disappointed Blue Byte doesn't push its ideas further with each new entry. The future's impressive. Just not quite as different as you might think.
Anno 2205 is good city builder with an interesting take on the future of humanity and with plenty of humanity, the kind of video game that a player can spend tens of hours with as long as he is interested in making all his cities run at peak efficiency all of the time.
Still, glorious though Anno 2205's cityscapes may be, a game that justifies the banality of numerical mechanics through visual sensation alone is inevitably one that provokes the question of whether or not it needed to exist at all. From this respect, Anno 2205 might have more in common with Photoshop or Illustrator than with its predecessors; for me, its most compelling purpose wasn't doing something, but making something. Whether or not that makes for a fulfilling experience is an open question; that Anno 2205 could be so much more is not.
Anno 2205 is a stellar city-building experience that rewards and demands precision in planning. It makes the compromises that real city management requires central to its mechanics, and the strong environmental theme helps to make it contextually relevant today.
Playing Anno 2205 gives one the feeling that something is missing, like a half-written novel or a song containing only the chorus. The possibilities of the setting are barely scratched upon, while the city-building, as competent as it is on the surface, leaves a lot to be desired for challenge.
This may be a bit harsh, but, at the end of the day, positives in favour of Anno 2205 are hard to come by, while shortcomings are abundant. Everything about it feels like a sleazy, cheap, cash-in title made by a company seeking to wring the final few coins out of a franchise it doesn't care about than a legitimate attempt at a game. It feels like the developers simply slapped on some pretty graphics in the hopes of fooling people, marked the price up to off-set the lack of an online shop, then kicked it out the door to sucker people into paying far more than they would have otherwise for such a boring and underwhelming title.
Anno 2205 is a crazy amount of fun, with a wide variety of locations, activities and a fairly rich campaign it's hard to put down.
Anno 2205 is a decent continuation of the franchise that instead of simply recycling its predecessors brings some revolutionary elements to the table as well. However, after a longer period of playing, the bitter taste of untapped potential remains in your mouth.
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