Anno 2070 is Ubisoft's new city builder for PC that follows after the whole Anno series. They are similar games, but each has added new elements or different approaches to the series. Anno 2070 looks to be adding very significant new features by taking the series into the not so distant future of 2070 where people will have to choose between the environment and industry. Each game has always been focused on building settlements on islands, dealing with other players/factions and exploring the sea, so does Anno 2070. The previous Anno games, Dawn of Discovery was the last of which I played, always had a really slow feel to them. They would generally have you waiting for tasks to get completed, tasks that would require you to harvest a certain amount of a resource and it often took quite a while until you would have enough of that resource. Like any city building sim, these games focus on balancing population and resources. Anno 2070 breaks away a bit from the slow feel of the previous games by adding all kinds of extra features on top of the basic city building tasks. You can trade with A.I. settlements or purchase items in bulk from your Eve ship, the ship is essentially your hub in every mission. There are also politics, research and choices to consider throughout the game. Anno 2070 is developed by Blue Byte, but published by Ubisoft. It does have some kind of always online feature, but it doesn't look as intrusive as other Ubisoft games. The game is slated for a release sometime during the holidays, but likely it won't be until early 2012.



Unfortunately, the demo was pretty narrow on what you could actually do. It was two missions long and it was only the first two missions, linear missions that presented you with very few choices. There is a video briefing that plays when you first start the game and it makes this big grand speech about how you will have to make tough choices between the two factions in the game, but the demo doesn't give you any hint of that. The two demo missions play very similarly to the early missions from Dawn of Discovery, the previous Anno. They give you objectives to do and you have no choice on whether or not you are going to do them. The graphics for Anno 2070 are quite good looking and it runs fairly well, but Battlefield 3 oddly yields a higher frame rate. They have shown off a bunch of exciting features for the game, like underwater cities or great environmental friendly cities, but the demo just shows some very basic features of the game and none of the exciting new features. The two missions will probably last you a hour in total, both of which are fairly short little storylines. The voice acting strikes me as odd, I cannot distinguish if it's purposely annoying or just poorly done. All of the city building elements are almost exactly the same as the previous games, you build houses for workers, you build food producing buildings, you harvest resources and then you get specialty buildings that create higher level citizens. Higher level citizens then have new demands and give you more building options. It is all pretty normal gameplay mechanics, but hopefully once the unique features of the game come into play later on it will feel a lot more rewarding.

If you are curious about the game then I would recommend trying the demo, but if you are waiting for reviews to see how it does then I would just say keep waiting. The demo does show off the engine and graphics, but there is so much that it doesn't let you experience. Even after the disappointing demo I have high hopes for Anno 2070, but it does have a decent chance of falling short of it's aspirations and lofty claims. To check out the demo head on over to: http://www.gamershell.com/news_128212.html. They have all the versions of the demo, but they do have some versions over at the Ubisoft forums for Anno 2070. Thanks for reading and check out my gameplay video above if you want to see a bit of the demo.
Main Website: http://anno-game.ubi.com/anno-2070/en-US/home/

-Written by Sean Cargle