Anno 1404: Gold Edition

I occassionally enjoy a city builder and this is by far the best I've played and I'm glad this masterpiece is DRM-free and free from Ubisoft's invasive meddling. You shouldn't go into this game thinking "I'm just going to beat the campaign" which actually serves to be more like a very lengthy tutorial in my eyes simply because the amount of content in this game is just massive. The biggest strength for me is the custom mode where you can pretty much make it as easy or as difficult as you want for yourself. Pretty much every setting you want to customize is available to you leaving you free to play the game however you want. You can even turn off enemies if you like, to purely focus on developing your settlements for that calm Zen experience. Absolute must have for city builder fans!

Parts of this game are fantastic. City building, resource and economic management, planning elements are sensible and challenging enough to make it fun. On the adventure side, there is world exploration, side quests, diplomacy, pirates, potentially hostile npc's, gear upgrades, etc. All cool elements of the game. Parts of the game are middling to downright lame. No manual. I repeat, no manual. I played several dozen hours before realizing or stumbling onto things that completely changed the nature of the game. Needs a thorough manual. To be clear, not a player made user's guide, not a bare bones "get going" card, a manual. A manual written by people with good grammar and who have developed or played a part in the making and playing of the game. Now that that's over, I have a knock knock joke. Knock knock, who's there? A manual. For a game built on either diplomacy or beligerence, both the sea battles and diplomacy options are pretty bare bones and uninteresting. I mean, you have as many options for choosing what direction a house faces as you do in diplomatic menus. That seems like a dubious weighting of player interaction with the game. Placing builidings and roads can be frustrating and time consuming. Time consumption laying roads and placing buildings in a real time strategy game is not good. And it's such a basic consideration in game design it seems like a rookie mistake. The game also becomes predictable and grindy. At what point that happens to various players is different. So it's not a killer that the game eventually becomes boring if it happens late in the cycle and you've got your 15 bucks worth. This is a GOG rebuild though, so who knows what truly goes back on the devs and what goes to GOG. As always, thanks to those who worked hard to bring us this and other games.

This Game is probably the best in its genre even 8 years later. By using wine and lutris i managed to get it to work on Linux perfectly

I bought this game when it was on sale if I remember and never really touched except an hour or so here and there. It wasn't until now, with the release of Anno 1800 that I thought "why not give this an actual go" and going into it head first without a clue what it actually was blew me away. That hour or so before was mostly spent in the sandbox mode and playing around with making nice looking cities. Some turned out okay. The graphics look amazing, especially for a 10 year old game. It's crisp and clean and... gosh it's just got such charm! Than I tired the campagin, thinking it was just a tutorial on how to build nice cities. HECK NO! It's a pretty interesting story about the rising of a crusade, and it teaches you the second main aspect of the Anno series. Production chains. Want to build ships? Build rope which is made from hemp which is made from a hemp farm that needs tools and lumber that you get from trading and lumberjacks. And it just gets deeper. Than throw in dipolamacy, battles, trade routes, quests... This game is deep! Or it can just be a simple city builder. The fact I was able to play it as a city builder and not run into too many issues without not knowing all the mechanics is amazing, and the fact that if I wanted to go deeper I can. Just because you've never played Anno before doesn't mean you should skip this title, it looks amazing, runs well (save for one weird chugging issue in a cutscene...) and it plays amazing.

I love this Series but if you're expecting a fair fight you won't be getting that here. The ANNO series has given me hours of fun and I still play it every year or so. The graphics and sound of all the ANNO series has always exceeded the standards of the time. There is a lot of fun to be had with this game. Where this series falls short is cheating NPC's. I'd like to point out that this may not affect everyone the same so you may love this game regardless. However the people who enjoy strategy will find this very annoying. What I mean by this is there is almost no real chance of economically crushing your enemies. They must all be put to the sword. That is the only means of conquering them. You can control the entire board cutting off you're NPC opponents from the resources they need. Even destroying there ports so they are cut off from all external supplies. At this point you should be able to watch them slowly crumble from a once modern superpower back to a small insignificant village. Unfortunately for the player that never happens. The NPC's citizens and cities will riot and recover endlessly all the while some how maintaining their technology and military might. It will become obvious to the player that they must swoop in with overwhelming military might to face off against the NPC's never ending magical resources and military. It is a real shame and the only stain on what would be a pristine RTS experience that could leave you playing this series regularly for years to come. I do still play this series every now and then but I'm always left with a deep sadness over what this series could have and should have been.