Anno Online Review

Rome wasn’t built in a day is a proverb used to instill patience, to remind people that good things come to those who wait (which, as it happens, is a proverb that reminds people Rome wasn’t built in a day, and not just a Guinness advertising slogan). Anno Online takes these two phrases and any others that extol the virtue of patience and applies them far too literally. Any city you build in Anno Online won’t be finished in a month, let alone a day.

It forces slow pacing upon you not because it wants you to appreciate the steady growth of your territory from an agricultural hamlet to a sprawling, industrial empire that spreads across multiple islands. It does so because it wants you to open your wallet, and spend your real money on the in-game currency of rubies that allows you to purchase the resources, items, and finance that will help your city expand at a rate that extends beyond the default setting of ‘painfully slow’.

Different islands have different soil types that support different crops

It’s clearly taken its inspiration from Facebook games, and you’re lucky if you can get more than an hour’s playtime out of it in a day without spending real money. Even when you spend real money, all it does is get you stuck in a cycle of needing to spend more and more to keep playing at the pace you’ve become accustomed to. To understand why that’s the case, it’d help to explain exactly how the game works.



Anno Online, like its forebears, is a city builder. Starting with just a harbourmaster’s office, you must build residences for your early pioneers to live in, then provide them with everything they need by building key buildings. Wheat farms and mills allow you to bake bread, which satisfies hunger, while a tavern will satisfy their need for entertainment. These are built using the basic resources of wood, stone, and iron, which are extracted from the environment using lumber mills and mines.

Once the needs of your people are met, you can upgrade their residences, allowing you to gain citizens of greater stature - first come vassals, then merchants, and then imperials. Gaining high numbers of these unlocks further buildings that satisfy the needs of the next tier, as well as eventually allowing you to build naval engineers and construct ships to colonise new islands and set up trade routes. You go through this cycle on a day-to-day basis, aimlessly improving your city with the simple goal of growing into a towering trade empire.

Imagine if every time you built a house in SimCity, the servers stopped you from playing. Oh, wait

Which brings us back to why the free-to-play model used in Anno Online is so pressurising and penny-pinching. You’ll upgrade 5 residences, and then find yourself unable to do anything until enough time has passed and your resources have once again accumulated to the necessary amount needed to upgrade the next 5 residences. But when you’re sat playing the game now, and might not be in the mood later - and all you need is another 100 stone to upgrade a residence - using a shortcut becomes very tempting. So, you buy some rubies, and cash them in on that precious stone.

Bingo - residence upgraded. You’re now that much closer to being a vast trading empire. Except, now you’ve spent that stone, you’re back to waiting. Worse, you’re used to that instant gratification - note, it’s not gross impatience that leads you to this route, more a frustration that in order to play the game without spending money, you have to not play the game far more than you actually play it - and so you spend more cash, get more rubies, get more stone, upgrade a residence, and the cycle threatens to repeat ad nauseum.

Even ignoring the slow pacing and the very little justification for it despite to garner money, Anno Online doesn’t have much going for it. There’s no real challenge, as all you’re doing is adding new buildings to your city in the prescribed order you unlock them, and there’s no way of failing. If you build the right amount of buildings and upgrade at the right times then your growth will be more efficient, granted, but efficiency is hardly a strong motivator.

Once you’re able to trade and colonise new islands the game gets much faster

Likewise, the ‘Online’ component is severely lacking at first, and you’ve got to invest a lot before you see it come into play. All you’ll experience of other players for a large majority of the game is seeing them in chat. Eventually, once you’ve unlocked the ability to build and use ships, you can set up trade routes and guilds with other players, but that comes a long time into the game. It’s true that the game speeds up and becomes far more enjoyable once you start setting up trade routes (even between your own islands, as you get more space to produce resources, and can thus do things faster) but it’s still not enough to save a slow-paced experience that barely lets you interact with other players until at least half way through the game.

There’s no challenge, no thought required. You follow the step-by-step instructions that are presented as quests, and fill up your island squares one building at a time. Annoyingly, though, it does just enough that you want to expand and upgrade, despite the fact there’s nothing enjoyable about it - it appealed to my dopamine reward pathway, nothing more. That’s why you yearn to do it at a faster pace, and why you might end up getting stuck in the cycle of spending money. If you avoid that, you’ll soon lose interest in Anno Online, as its inability to provide you with a clear, overall goal means the initial slow pace isn’t worth putting up with for long enough to experience it when it starts hitting its stride. And even when that happens, it’s still not worth shouting about.