Anno 2070 Impressions - Everything was better in the old days

I've been spending some hours with Anno 2070 this week. This latest installment in the build-em-up Anno series takes us out from the old times of wooden galleons and muskets that have been the trademark setting of the series so far, and instead dumps us into the semi-near future of the year 2070.

In Anno 2070's future Earth setting, global warming has certainly manifested itself to be anything but a myth, and has blessed millions of people with unexpected ocean views. Unfortunately it has also cursed several other millions of people with severe moisture problems and resulted in a frenzied competition for Earth's precious resources.

During the main campaign of the game you'll be tasked with assisting either of the two main factions in Anno 2070, the Gordon Gekko loving "Global Trust", who want nothing more than to suck every last piece of useful molecule out of mother Earth. Or the tree hugging "Eden Initiative", who are all about not trying to completely destroy what little remains of the planets ecological health. Also, I imagine that they smoke a lot of weed.

Jumping into the game, things will immediately look fairly familiar if you've played any previous "Anno" game.
Through an isometric overhead view you'll be overseeing your little slice of Terra and plan out small island colonies by building everything from ports, housing, mines, power plants and so on.

The important building is the tall white one... ah crap

In classic city building game fashion, everything is connected and every building adds something to your settlement, while also bringing in new requirements of its own.
You'll need to have tools to build buildings, but a tool workshop requires coal and iron, which requires mines and those require workers that need houses.
The way everything fits together is one of the most interesting things about playing these types of games.
You're constantly adding a new piece on top of your existing settlement, and every time you do, you'll have to make a tweak here and a nip there to make sure everything is still running optimally. It's not a game for people that crave action and big explosions, let me just make that clear right away.

In the previous Anno games we've seen the developers, Blue Byte, focusing more on adding some "story" elements into the campaign of the game. So you'll not just be left to building up your settlements, but you'll also have to steer your small ships around and rescue some survivors from a sunken ship for example, or dive beneath the ocean and look for a sunken piece construction.

This seems to be even more prevelant in Anno 2070 than it has been in the previous games, and unfortunately I do not think it is for the better. The story itself is very weak, the quality of the cut scenes that move it along is *just* passable, and the voice over is just flat out bad.

I wish that Blue Byte would have just done away with the story, other than to present you with objectives for the map and then maybe an intro and outro cut scene for the missions.
As I have only been at the game for the opening hours I don't know if the story stuff takes a back seat later on, but it has really killed much of my desire to keep playing.

Any second now your gameplay will be interrupted by a poorly done cut scene

Now on to look at the gameplay itself.
And really, things are pretty much cut and paste from the previous Anno games, which I have loved, so you would think that would make me a happy little eco camper.
Unfortunately I just don't think that these mechanics work as well on the futuristic setting of Anno 2070.
I'm not sure if it's the fact that you're still placing distilleries and woodcutter huts in a science fiction setting that is putting me off, or maybe the fact that the general style of the buildings is just a little bland, making it hard to really distinguish what is going on in your little kingdom.
Or maybe it's the addition of underwater constructions, which adds a whole new layer that you have to monitor and run separate from your above surface domain, creating more complexity than I really care for.

All these things come together and have sadly left me feeling rather cold about playing Anno 2070.
Despite being quite similar to the older games in the series, there's just not the same spark to it that makes me want to sink tens of hours into building up and optimizing my island colonies.

I was really looking forward to seeing how the Anno series would feel in a science fiction setting, but I'm afraid I've just come away from the experience wishing that Blue Byte had made another game with sail boats and wooden barrels.



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