Anno 2205 Reviews
There's definitely a market for this game, but I completely understand why so many long-time fans are so upset.
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.
Anno 2205 seems like it had promise but was subsequently scaled back on release. It's a decent diversion with some more than decent visuals but you'll crave so much more, especially after Cities: Skylines.
It's fairly enjoyable, but wait for a sale
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.
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 wears a distant future sci-fi aesthetic, but does nothing of substance or import with the premise.
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.