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This is my third time playing Anno 117: Pax Romana over the last couple of months, and it's by far the most impressed I've been with Ubisoft Mainz's upcoming city builder.
The difference? I finally got to play it natively on my PC instead of streaming it remotely over the internet. The result was immediately obvious: crisper visuals, snappier controls, and an all-around substantially more enjoyable experience.
But there's another reason this session hit differently. This time, I got my hands on four hours of the main campaign and a good chunk of the sandbox mode, giving me a much fuller picture of what Anno 117 is shaping up to be. Previous sessions only allowed me up to two hours of playtime, which isn't much for a game like Anno.
A Campaign That Actually Matters
Here's something I wasn't expecting: the campaign's story is surprisingly engaging. That's refreshing in a genre where narrative is usually treated as an afterthought at best. Don't get me wrong - it's not going to win any awards for storytelling, but it didn't annoy me either, which in city builder terms feels like a genuine win.
You start by choosing between a male or female character before being sent to an island with the ruins of a city called Ambrosia, destroyed in a natural disaster. You arrive with nothing but your ship and immediately get to work - building houses, warehouses, lumberyards, wheat farms, and so on. Pure Anno.
The preview build I played featured around four hours of campaign content alongside a similar length of sandbox mode, which lets you build freely without any story constraints.
Surprisingly Welcoming
One thing that struck me immediately in the first hour or so is how newcomer-friendly Anno 117 feels. Sure, it can seem a bit overwhelming at first with all those UI elements and interconnected mechanics, but Ubisoft has done a wonderful job explaining everything through clean tutorial pop-ups and a steady drip-feed of features throughout the campaign.
Unlike some other city builders, there's no tedious micromanagement here. Your job is to build and ensure various local businesses sync up with each other to achieve maximum efficiency. Yes, that usually means your city ends up looking like a soulless grid of perfectly optimized bricks, but you can't really min-max and look pretty - pick your poison.
In the campaign, the emperor overseeing my governance was mostly chill. I'm not sure if that's by design or if I was just doing a brilliant job, but things did get complicated toward the end of my session with some interesting twists and turns. Now I'm genuinely eager to see where it goes.
Hooked
Honestly, I don't have a lot of gripes - if any. The preview build of Anno 117: Pax Romana delivered that addictive, time-melting gameplay where you suddenly realize you've been playing for hours without noticing.
If I had to nitpick, it'd be about performance. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't perfect either. Playing on a high-end PC with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RTX 4080, Anno 117 struggled to hit 60 FPS at 4K resolution on Ultra settings with ray tracing enabled and DLSS set to Balanced. Frame rates hovered around 40-50 FPS, and I noticed some stuttering when zooming in and out.
That said, there's still plenty of time until launch. Ubisoft Mainz has room to work on optimization, so hopefully the final build will run much smoother than what I experienced.
Wrapping up
After three sessions with Anno 117: Pax Romana, I'm genuinely excited about this one. It's approachable without being dumbed down, engaging without being exhausting, and it's got that "just one more turn" (in Anno's case it's just) magic that makes great strategy games impossible to put down. If they can iron out the performance kinks before launch, this could be one of the best entries in the series yet.
