HEAVEN SENATE

ANNO 117: PAX ROMANA gives you space to Rome

- Phil Iwaniuk

It wasn’t built in a day. But this latest Anno in a long-running series of accessible and endearingly twee city builders doesn’t take that old adage entirely to heart. There’s complexity to its supply chains and economy, but it takes a ruthless writer’s pen to the systems-bloat and perplexing menu rabbit holes found elsewhere in the genre. As a result, overseeing a burgeoning Roman territory feels far less like filling in a tax return than other city builders, and more like the power fantasy that we probably all showed up for in the first place.

The Pax Romana era was a golden age for the be-sandalled denizens of the Roman empire, full of peace, prosperity, and neatly laundered togas. Developer Ubisoft Mainz uses this happy clappy context well for a bit of early game tutorializing, trotting you through some basic supply chain creation via a menu layout that will feel like stepping into worn-in old shoes to Anno 1800 players, but which Tropico or Cities Skylines veterans would find almost confrontationally straightforward: you begin by clicking on the resource you'd like your citizens to start making, then—from a popup menu which shows you the buildings required to make it—you drop the necessary structures into the world. Simplicity itself, and enough to make you wonder why almost every other game does this process in reverse. There’s plenty of subtlety to even this most basic action, though.