Anno 1404: Gold Edition

Beautifull graphics and soundtarck, immersive gameplay, Anno 1404 is one of the finest in the series. The Orient and Venice add a bit of spice to the in game economy. The game grabs your attention completely and the session lenght reminders come in handy to keep you in check with reality.

Its a good game but it suffers from an awful memory leak that takes some of the enjoyment out of the game. You are forced to continually save and close the game so it doesn't crash. Thankfully the game will warn you (or should) when its going to run out of memory, but its still frustrating. That aside, the game is good fun. Its nice to play a semi-peaceful game about economically dominating your rivals rather than defeating them in battle. The graphics are good, it runs reasonably well (when its not crashing) and is complex, but accessible, enough to be deep and fun. While the online servers may have been taken down, it is possible to use services such as GameRanger to run sudo LAN games over the internet. My girlfriend and I are enjoying it. My top tip: Get it on sale. At the end of the day, its a game from 2010 by BlueByte (Settlers, another one of my faves)

I enjoyed the game and it looks great. The way it evolves and how calm everything is, is soothing and enjoyable. But I feel like it needs to hold your hand more. Sometimes I felt a bit lost, saw no tutorials and didn't really grasp how one thing affected the other.

This is the best game in the Anno series. The interface is perfect, the atmosphere is perferct and unlike modern games, the game is not balanced down to the point of forcing a single way of playing. You can explore quite a lot of different approaces in the game and optimize your city planning or competition strategy. A relaxed, enjoyable game.

I really love this game. Especially the possibility to play it co-op – or with different fractions on LAN with my friends. The possibility to unite and/or to fight together against a common enemy makes this game uniquely interesting. For sure one of the best games of the anno series with th typical simple but interesting game mechanics. BUT: Even nearly 10 years after the release there are still a hell of bugs in it. The most annoying are the memory leaks and that it crashes after it uses more than 2GiB of RAM. There are community-patches around, that increase the amount of memory it can use but this is neither a fix nor do I like to search in community forums for bug fixes. This should be the job of Ubisoft. Tipp: Play on wine with the 4GiB patch from the Ubisoft user-forum. Works much better than on windows. And this is not the only one. If the game of a player crashes you cannot kick him. You are gong to save several times and the other players loose their achivements... Still a good game that could be so much better if it would have been made with more love.