Anno 117: Pax Romana

Anno 117: Pax Romana was provided by Ubisoft for review. Thank you!

Anno 117: Pax Romana has come at a critical time for Ubisoft, when consumer confidence in the publisher is at an all-time low; it really needs to pull through and deliver the best Anno experience yet. However, Anno 117's familiarity is both good for those coming back to the series and its biggest downfall.

The game gives you 2 very simple options to start a game: either a Campaign game or an Endless one. Regardless of which option you choose, you can then enable multiplayer to bring your friends into the game. Curiously, there's no online matchmaking in Anno 117, so you have to play with those on your friend's list, which will no doubt disappoint some.

I spent most of my time playing through the game's campaign, and I must say, aside from the slightly off-putting voice acting, the campaign is actually quite enjoyable to play through. The characters are somewhat decently written, and it largely feels like a Sandbox game, just with a few cutscenes sprinkled here and there, and frequent events as you progress to keep things fresh and interesting. But by and large, you can play how you want.

Although set in the Roman Empire and Britain during 117 AD, Anno 117 has very little historical accuracy. All of the characters in the game are seemingly fictional, as are the battles and events that occur during the campaign, which feels like a real shame. One of the intriguing parts of historical games like this is seeing a portrayal of historic events. This is, by and large, Ubisoft's own take on the era, filled with people being far more reasonable and understanding than you would expect.

The gameplay of Anno 117 itself is largely unchanged from the Annos of yesteryear. You aim to create a city comprised of various classes, providing food, public services, clothing, and ultimately luxuries as you upgrade your dwellings from lower-class to upper-class residencies. It does this as well as ever, with the resources of each island forcing you to expand and trade with ships to progress beyond the basics. Anno is primarily an economy-management series, and Anno 117 stays true to this philosophy.

However, that is also the problem with Anno 117: it's very similar to all the Anno games that came before it. And while the new setting has some interesting quirks, namely if you're building in "Albion", there are swamps you have to deal with, it really doesn't change the basic gameplay. I feel like at this stage, Anno needed something new to give it a kickstart, and this game just isn't it. If anything, some longstanding parts of Anno have been made worse.

The UI I found to be quite... cumbersome. I'm not quite sure what Ubisoft thought was wrong with the UI in previous Anno games, but Anno 117 has a peculiar combination of horizontal and vertical tabs that, when combined, end up being needlessly confusing. The Anno series had already refined its UI over many iterations, and Anno 117 is trying to take a different direction, but it doesn't work well. Even after a few hours, I was still making constant mistakes when trying to find the correct build menu.

I also experienced some issues with the game. I experienced visual glitches in some cutscenes and visual artifacts on certain buildings, such as the Mud Driers. Audio also overlaps; if you are zoomed in on your city or a ship when a cutscene starts, for example, you will hear the ambient sounds throughout the cutscene, completely overshadowing any voices. This can also happen if you complete quests close together, resulting in overlapping voices. There are little things like that here and there that really let Anno 117 down.

The biggest question Anno 117: Pax Romana leaves me with is, what does this game add to the series? Mostly, I would say it's just the new campaign, and even though it's a good one, it might not be worth that price tag. In terms of gameplay, not much has really changed here. If I had to pick an Anno game to play, I would still choose Anno 1800, thanks to its more straightforward UI, better performance, and, frankly, a time period that lends itself to more interesting gameplay.

Anno 117: Pax Romana - Steam Deck Performance

Unfortunately, Anno 117: Pax Romana is a bit of a pain to play on the Steam Deck. I had to use Proton Experimental just to get the game to boot. Once it does boot, the game does support 1280x800 as a resolution, so we can avoid the black borders. But, for whatever reason, gamepad support seems to be broken when playing the game on Linux/Proton, meaning the new controller support that Anno 117 enjoys isn't really of much use to us here; we have to use a keyboard layout to play on Steam Deck.

I would also recommend that you choose the "Medium (TV)" UI Scaling option, as it's the largest and makes most of the text in-game easy enough to read, but you might still struggle with some.

As for the actual performance of the game, it's... poor. You'll need to run on Low settings, and I recommend setting the in-game FSR upscaling to "Ultra Performance". You should also lock the game to 30 FPS using the SteamOS frame limiter.

With these settings, a game with a moderately sized city manages to hold 30 FPS, albeit with frequent stutters, but I ran the in-game benchmark, which places you in a much larger city with more going on, and we did start to see some troubles. Stuttering became more frequent, and in very large cities, we saw the FPS drop into the low 20s.

The full benchmark tests on these settings are as follows: FPS Average: 47.7, FPS 5% Lows: 25 (due to frequent stuttering). 80% of the time, we were GPU-bound, not CPU-bound.

Power draw was around 21W-22W, with temperatures being around 70C-75C. Expect around 2 hours of battery life on a Steam Deck OLED and around 80-90 minutes on a Steam Deck LCD.

Accessibility:

Anno 117 features colorblind filters for the three main types of color blindness. There is also UI scaling available, as well as the ability to change text to use Sans-Serif fonts instead of Serif ones. Subtitles are available, and you can also adjust notification length to keep notifications readable on-screen for longer (or shorter).

Conclusion:

Anno 117 is a competent city builder, but the Roman/British theming doesn't really do it for me, especially when it's all fictional anyway... The game feels like a step down from Anno 1800 in almost every way except graphically. If you're interested in the campaign of Anno 117, I'd say it might be worth a look, but for sandbox/multiplayer gameplay, I'd still say Anno 1800 is king for me.

Anno 117 is technically playable on the Steam Deck, but I'm not sure I would recommend buying the game to play it solely on the Deck. Hopefully, updates to Proton and/or the game will fix controller support, which would help, but the performance is troubling, especially for multiplayer games.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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