When last we saw Ubisoft’s Anno series, it had taken the bold decision to leave history behind and travel into the brave new world of the year 2070. Four years later, developer Blue Byte are looking to the future once more for their next game. But they’re also looking up, since their new game – Anno 2205 – is heading in an interesting new skyward direction.
This time, we’re going to the moon.
Anno 2205 is the biggest change in the series Blue Byte has ever made. While 2070 saw the series take on a sci-fi setting, it remained rather conservative and played much like the previous games. Anno 2205 focuses on the need to extract resources from the surface of the moon, and gears much of its systems and story towards embarking on a massive space mission to set up a mining colony.
As 2205 opens, you’ll be firmly grounded on earth as you build up your corporation. As a city builder and economics management game, you’ll spend a great amount of time producing cities with farms, industrial zones, and towering residential districts. From the start it’s clear that 2205 is an astonishingly beautiful game, with incredible detail on buildings when zoomed in close, and rows of traffic made up of flying cars to create that Coruscant effect. Making this landscape is simple, and there’s been a lot of work put into the graphics-heavy interface to prevent things feeling spreadsheet-like. There’s been a heavy emphasis on making things simple and effective during development. “A trading route used to need sixteen clicks. We knew from our research that this was where we lost some beginners, so we tried to reduce that. The number of clicks that you need to create something is now much less, seven or eight,” explains Dirk Riegert, Anno 2205’s Creative Director. “All the new approaches are moving into that direction: keeping the complexity but making it less complicated.”
As you build your city empire, your economy and technology will close upon the first major goal of space flight. With a space port built you can start to ship materials to the moon, which is when things really start to open up. See, the moon isn’t your final goal. It’s merely a new resource. But rather than just building an extractor on it’s surface, you’ll need to work hard to reap the rewards. You need to set up a colony. And whilst colony building has similarities to city building, they’re two different sides to Anno’s coin.
“The look and feel is really different,” says Riegert. “On earth there are cities, and on the moon there are not cities but colonies. You don’t live there because it’s so beautiful up there, you live there because you have something to do up there. The challenges you have to take on when you’re on the moon are very different, it’s a more hostile environment.”
