Passing Judgment on... Anno 2070
Related Designs’ Anno 2070 is the latest entry in the long-running and underappreciated Anno series, making the jump into a future Earth ravaged by climate change with rising sea levels and collapsed mega cities. Your job is to give the survivors from these cities a fresh start in the little unflooded land still available. All with the aid of one of three factions, the SAAT – the science types, the Eden Initiative – the environmentalist types and Global Trust Inc. – yep, you guessed it, the industrialist types. This presents an interesting morality to gameplay, though an implicit morality rather than a literal good-evil ranking. It’s up to you to decide whether to maximise profits and efficiency at a risk to the environment with the Global Trust, or to maximise environmental recovery and take a hit on profit margins with the Eden Initiative. It’s an interesting dilemma for the player, and it’s refreshing to see a game not bashing you over the head with morality systems and leaving it to you to decide what’s best for your settlements.
Of course, the Anno gameplay we’ve come to know over the past decade is still here in 2070, balancing your economy across multiple islands while keeping some of the factions happy and completing quests. RTS fans will be familiar with the resource gathering here, requiring certain chains of buildings to keep your production going, and setting up trade routes between islands. Units control like they would in an RTS too, with similar kinds of movement options. One of the big new additions to this iteration of Anno is the ability to not only go underwater, but build cities there too – which makes sense given the fact that so little of the land in 2070’s vision of Earth is above sea level! While Anno 2070 plays like an RTS in these regards, and while there is combat in Anno, don’t buy this game expecting it to be Starcraft or Command and Conquer. The real emphasis here is growing your economy and managing your production and workforce.
Anno’s story-driven campaign mode, while short, acts as a well-paced tutorial for newcomers to the series. Interestingly, everything you build from mission to mission carries over, saving you from spending another 10-20 minutes at the start of a mission getting your settlements running again. Really though, Anno 2070’s campaign is the starter course to the main Continuous Play mode. Here, you pick a faction and get stuck in, free of any quests or objectives that would have ended your mission in the story mode. This, again, reminds me of Sim City’s main single player mode and it’s a welcome change of pace from the campaign mode.
As you would have come to expect from a Ubisoft-published title, the graphics are sumptuous with incredible attention to detail and visual flourishes, from schools of fish swirling next to the coastline, to trees moving in the wind. It’s very impressive and paints an idyllic picture of an Earth returning to the way nature intended… Well… Sort of… If you forget the whole climate change thing…
Continued at: http://jonnyedge.blogspot.com/2012/01/passing-judgment-on-anno-2070.html
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