It is the first time I am writing a review but, considering what the game is, as a old fan of the anno games, I feel like I have to.

First, I must say I can't blame the devs for trying to renew the series. I don't see how they could have added good things to the mechanics of the previous games without changing what is already in place, so I think change was necessary. The devs did too, and so it went.

However, what we ended up with is an empty game! Or, rather, a collection of loosely connected minigames, but in any case nothing as deep as any of its predecessors. It is all child play.
Basically, you are just filling the map with buildings until you run out of space (if you manage to not get bored to death before). It doesn't really matter where and how as long as it is in the right sector, connected to a road and, preferably, as close as possible to the service producing buildings it requires (or the other way around if it is a service building you are placing). As for the kind of building, basically you start with some houses, then you go on with service buildings and factories until your stock manager says production meets consumption. There are no trading routes, you just select the type of good, the source, the destination, the transfer rate you want and you are done. Also, you don’t really need trading routes so much in the first place because you can produce anything in any sector as long as it is a sector of the right biome. At some point you may need some rare materials. To get these you will have to either do some quests (move your main (only) ship around the current sector), do a crisis sector (some sort of donjon crawler with boats, totally independent from the main game. I don't really understand what it thinks it's doing here. Maybe it stand as a reminder of the fact that the previous games had a military aspect) or play the asteroid miner android game.
There is just no mechanic in that game that is not trivial to master.

I understand why some of the mechanics have been removed. By replacing the carts and boats with abstractions of themselves, you end up with something that, from any meaningful perspective, behaves the same way but only uses a fraction of the resources the original requires to run which, in turn, allow the devs to make things huge. But then, despite all the potential offered by this approach, it looks like they went for the cheapest solutions. Why did you have to make trading routes so dumb? Why did you have to remove the fertility mechanic? Given that these two things could have been there, was it so hard to replicate the random maps with sectors instead of islands? Sadly, no.
The devs made room for new things and gave themselves great tools and then did nothing with them. So that's what the game ended up full of: nothing.


So, to new comers I would say, save your money, buy anno 2070 instead. You will get way more for a much lower price. The anno game series is definitely one of the great names of its genre and 2205 tried to renew it but it fails to create anything worthy of your time and money as far as gameplay is concerned.

I am a long time fan of anno games. It is my favorite game franchise. I've been waitng for YEARS for the next anno release. Having loved Anno 2070, I KNEW the next one would be awesome. I was hoping for space, so, so, hoping for space. . . .and then Anno 2205 came out. I read the negative reviews, and I told myself it couldn't be that bad. I waited for it to go on sale, where as I paid full price for Anno 2070, just in case I would regret the full price tag. Even so, even at the high discounted rate, I was disappinted. Even after reading all the bad reviews, playing Anno 2205 and experiencing it myself was such a huge let down. Everything I loved about Anno games is gone. Its so dumbed down. No more resource management or careful production planning, no more map creation, all gone. Just plop buildings down whereever, build a road and sit. Its stupid, mindless and boring. Is this supposed to be a console game? A tablet game? What? It certainly isn't a PC game. Even the map is annoying. No more random maps, no more panning map view able to just pan over to other islands or catch whales swimming or watch shpis (now all map areas are in different screens with loading wait times), no more little details that made the worlds seem like, well, real worlds. No more micro-managing resources and planning supply chains or careful map lay out. All that is gone. Now you just drop in farms as whole units. No more warehouses, all you need is a road. No more sea battles in the old sense, now it is a sperate battle screen that takes yuo completely out of the game. There is not one game's worth of play here let alone playing again and again and again like I have previous Anno versions. I've played and replayed Anno 2070 and others for YEARS. No more. Looks like I'm done with Anno. Yet another awesome PC game franchise killed.

The older Anno games have hundreds of hours of replay value, especially with their random map generators. This game has one big storyline lasting a few hours, which offers you nothing really interesting when you're done with it. All the city locations are the same in each playthrough, all the missions will be the same in each playthrough, and there's not even a skirmish mode to bring anything new to each game. They got rid of it completely.(along with manual saves for some reason)

You also no longer get to trade with/declare war on your competitors. They don't even have any cities present on the map. They offer you missions with small rewards from time to time, as well as sector project missions, but the only trading done is with a neutral space station that happens to have every resource available. The only combat is done against some really generic villain who declared the Moon independent for some reason. The only representation of your competitors as actual competition is found in a bar graph, showing who's got the highest corporation rating based on the total population managed by each corporation.(though their people doesn't really exist anywhere, you're the only one with an actual simulated population)

There's no downside to being below your competitors, other than their constant smug comments that you ♥♥♥♥.

It's an Anno game, so it's still pretty fun to just manage your cities and build your production chains, and I love how you can finally see the supply/consumption rates of your city at a glance, but I wouldn't recommend getting this one over the older games. It doesn't offer anything particularly new, and removes a bunch of good, staple features of the Anno series.

Buy the older games if you're interested. They're cheaper and last longer.

Anno 2205 brings a lot of change to the Anno franchise. Unfortunately not all of them have been thought through.

Let me start with some good changes: The economy system has been changed. Inside a "sector" the need of establishing trade routes has been removed. Power, build force and resources are automatically transferred between different islands. However the concept of trade routes is not gone entirely. It has been shifted to the "world view", where you can exchange needed resources between sectors.

Also, thanks to the fact that the game now displays resource and goods output per building and also per sector, it has become a lot easier to create such routes.

A lot of reviews claim that the system of "storage" on an island/sector is gone. This is not true. Overproduction is still being sent to the warehouse, and you can still monitor it by hovering your mouse over the goods item in the sector overview (found in the lower left corner of your Hud in sector view). It will still fullfill the needs of your residents if the sector output drops to the negative. However, if you have negative output and build new production lines to fullfill that need, it will increase resident satisfaction instantly, instead of slowly charging up like in the previous games.

What is gone from the game is the ability to load overproduction onto your ship at will (you still do this for missions). I am also still searching for a per sector breakdowm of my inhabitants and, more importantly, free living space. This, among other function the Anno regular might be used to, seems to be either removed or tied to one of those final monument structures that I have yet to reach.

[edit] ScoobyDoomyDoom mentioned in a comment that you can find your population statistics hidden behind the little "people" button next to the minimap.[/edit]

[edit] I have encountered a very annoying bug with the public needs buildings and the "move structure" feature. Whenever I move resident buildings in order to optimize public needs output, to reduce the amount of required public structures, the game will calculate the new layout wrong and assign needs deficits when there is actually a huge overproduction. Strangely enough, this bug will sometimes fix itself by closing the game and restarting the map. It is quite annoying however to have 150.000 Investors move out because of a lack of mobility even after creating a +27 surplus around them, with sufficient road connections. Especially when this means your income suddenly takes a death plunge.[/edit]

Different sectors

Right now there exist 3: Temperate, arcitc and lunar. Arctic and lunar have special requirements to their building sceme, and Lunar buildings cost an arm and a leg to build, but other than that they mostly add some visual difference rather than gameplay ones. Your population in temperate regions mostly provides the money for your exploits in the other two sectors, so you go back once in a while to up population. Meanwhile population in the other two sectors is only important to increase your spaceport level (to be able to transport goods back to your home region).

Modules

This is probably the best addition yet. For every production building you can make meaningful adjustments in order to increase productivity or reduce maintainance. Not only that, but in different sectors different modules make more sense. Rule of thumb: upgrading a farm is cheaper and puts less strain on your energy/income than building a second farm. It also takes up less space. And for those mountain and shore spots it is absolutely neccesary in order to get the best out of them.

Now to the absolute negative... combat.

I am not sure what to say about it, so here a brief description: Instead of waging war with concurring factions in your own sector the game has a set of crisis sectors where you can duke it out with a preset fleet of ships that can be upgraded and will be expanded as your population grows. The gameplay seems like a simple Dawn of War 2 Clone, with varying but similar objectives. So far so boring for someone who came to Anno after playing RTS for years.

The AI is horrible. Ships patrol in preset sectors, you get too close they stick to you like glue until you run away far enough. The games trickle down to "kill those five ships, retreat, repair, kill those four ships, retreat, repair" while finding the best route to your objective. In order to increase the difficulty the amount of ships in the sector is simply raised, to the point where you are tiptoeing trough a minefield on hardes settings. Tedious, but not in the slightest challenging.

Variation? No. There are three or four scenarios for each region, and they will start repeating soon. by repeating I mean very same map with opponents in the very same spot. The only reason to do this is to get rare materials that can be used to upgrade your buildings. It could have been a smartphone app. Woud have had more replay value than the app they actually released, if not by much.

Compared to the excellent combat system in 1404 and the still very god combat system in 2070 this is a joke, and a direct insult to my intelligence.

The crowning touches is that the only online activity in this game are council votings and trading on the online market.

If Ubisoft wants a positve review they will need to address:

The combat system, best you throw it out and do it anew.
Ship building, I want to build my fleet myself. And I like my fleets big.
Multiplayer, and by that I mean both coop and competetive

[edit] According to Ubisoft, multiplayer is to follow soon(tm). There is no information yet on how exactly this is to work, though.[/edit]

If you want to pull Anno out of the garbage before the playerbase vanishes you better get those done. Not neccesarily quickly, but in a well polished and professional manner. Playable. Enjoyable.

[edit] Minoes claimed that if you were looking for a singleplayer economy building game and did not care about the military part, you could safely buy the game. I felt that I had to put up a clarification for people like him: Yes, the economy part is done well. No it does not make the game a safe deal.

The problem is the replay value. The average player will be hitting the last technologies after 15 hours of gameplay. Adding the sector projects you gain roughly 20 hours of progressive gameplay. Half of that if you build up a strong economy from the start and do not take up as much time waiting to unlock sectors from other corporations.

After that there is pretty much nothing to do other than prettying up your settlement or perfecting your goods chains. The 9 sectors currently ingame are pre made with pre made main and side missions and repetetive mini-quests. This might be great for casual players and people going for the perfect pretty city. But even that only became interesting in the prequels because the random islands and their different properties spiced things up.

Okay, 10 to 20 hours sounds promising to some, but in the prequels you spent the same amount of time on your average random map, with always changing challenges and opportunities (some which you could pick, some which the map predefined), with a singleplayer campaign and single missions still on top of that. And (I know I am repeating myself) multiplayer support to play together or against each other.[/edit]

[edit 05.Nov.2015] Fixed a few typos, added information on population and multiplayer.
[edit 06.Nov.2015] Response to comments added.
[edit 14.Nov.2015] Ubi announced a fix for random online disconnects

I am a diehard Anno-fan ever since having been enchanted by Anno 1602. Naturally, the newest addition to the franchise, Anno 2205 by Ubisoft Blue Byte, was going to be a definite purchase. Does it live up to its numerous predecessors?

Anno 2205 is a logical continuation of Anno 2070. 2070's main selling point was the new setting, but apart from that it stayed very true to the Anno-formula in which you navigate a large open map, filled with randomly generated islands on which to settle, optimise your economy, care for your citizens' needs, all while dealing with your NPC-competitors (or other players online), who do the same in real time. There always was something magical about starting the game with nothing but a single exploration-vessel with some wood and a few tools on board, finding a place that suits you and watching it grow until it is thriving and full of life.

With Anno 2205, Ubisoft Blue Byte seems to attempt to step outside of their own comfort-zone. There are several radical changes to the old formula. No longer do you start the game with a race for the best island. In fact, the whole concept of the single large ocean-map was done away with alltogether. Now, you get to choose between one of three maps of the Temperate zone, all of which preconstructed - no more random generation. The maps differ slightly in the amount of buildable land and resource-building-spots. They also all feature a unique set of side-quests - this may be rebuilding an old dam for a massive increase in power-generation or constructing a monument. While the maps still technically feature islands, they are much larger in size than they were in previous games and some can even be connected via bridges.
So far, so good, yet that is not where the changes end.
No longer do you and the NPCs coexist together on the same map. Instead, they automatically occupy the maps you did not choose to build their cities off-camera. The only interaction you have with them is through sidequests they issue you occasionally (much like in Anno 2070) or through the ingame-menu, which connects all the zones on a worldmap. Once you reach certain milestones with your corporation, you will gain access to again one of three maps of the Arctic region, then again to one of three maps on the moon (creatively, the craters are the islands here). Both of these regions come with their own challenges, your Arctic settlers will need to live near factories to stay warm, your Lunar colonists must be protected from meteor-showers by building shield-generators. All maps produce unique consumer-goods required by the inhabitants of all your three maps, so you must have them supplement each other via trading routes.
Again, the three maps are completely seperate from each other, but you can access them all through a menu and while you are playing, all three will continue simulating in the background.

The intention behind all this is, according to the devs, to let the players focus on what they enjoyed most in Anno - building a huge, sprawling city with a highly industrious economy. Granted, this is one of Anno's strongest selling points, yet in 2205 this is made so easy for you, achieving this seems too trivial to have much of an impact.
No longer do you carefully monitor your resources to decide which production-chains need optimising. The game flat-out tells you exactly how much of a deficit or surplus you are producing. The large, completely uncontested maps give you more than ample space to plonk down much more than you need to reach the highest-level citizens, so space-management isn't quite as much of an artform anymore, either.
Oh, and did I mention the military-part of the game is now also its very own sub-game?
Instead of having to balance economy and military, you now have an off-map fleet, given to you at the start of the game, which resolves any conflicts you may have. Much like the maps you build on, the game features "Conflict zones", purely for your fleet to do short combat-missions in. You will always fight the same enemy (this game's version of pirates, basically eco-terrorists), find consumables to help you out (like instant-repairs or missile-strikes) and, scattered through the mission and upon completion, gain rare materials. These materials cannot be mined/produced by you, so you must either do sidequests for them or play in the conflict-zones. With them, you can upgrade your existing factories and add modules to them Sim City-style.
The combat missions become dreadfully dull after doing them all on each difficulty, especially while not being able to customise your fleet. Having the military-aspect banished to its own maps also means that your cities are never in any danger. Your only enemy here is messing up so bad that you run out of credits, and even then you will be given loan after loan.

Can I recommend 2205?
I have bashed many of the "new" things in Anno 2205. This is because personally, I didn't want it to change this much. I wanted the old formula with a few added twists, new factions, spiffier gameplay and all that. The Anno-engine is a solid foundation, it still looks absolutely gorgeous and simply planning everything out and optimising still had me engaged for a solid 8 hours in the same game.
Yet, to me it feels like 2205 is caught somewhere between its ancestry in the RTS/economy-sim heaven and its contemporary brethren of the casual city-builders. This indecisiveness is what makes me not recommend the game, because it doesn't satisfy either genre. It is not complex enough to be a classic Anno-game, yet also doesn't feel like a city-builder (still no round roads, no terraforming or landscaping).

In the end, I must advise caution if you are interested in 2205. Have a look at the mechanics and ask yourself if you want an Anno which is so very different from the old ones. Also keep in mind the very steep pricing.
At the time of writing this review, barring any revolutionary DLC or content-patches in the near future (multiplayer, anyone?), I cannot recommend Anno 2205.

Please don't waste your money on this game. I own every Anno and was so excited for Anno 2205, I preordered the gold with the season pack... I haven't been this disappointed since EA ruined Command and Conquer.

The graphics are beautiful, except that the gameplay is very different from 1404/2070 and grossly overly simplified. The biggest thing that bothers me is that there is no resource management, citizens tell you exactly how much of a item they want, and you build a building to provide it, there is no guessing or balancing. Once you build the resource building it just happily generates resources for the rest of the game. Most buildings just have slots you build them on, especially disappointed that the island warehouse and dock area is prebuilt and can only be in the location the force you to put it in. There is no creative expression, you can move buildings any time you want for no cost, there is no multiplayer, no skirimish, no scenarios, no challenges, just one campaign consisting of nine maps. I've been playing the game on expert and have yet to worry once about income.

The combat is only done on the same few maps, on rotation, completely seperate from your city. You get one of every ship and you cannot set task groups or use any tactics beyond scorched earth. Simply order your ship forward and spam the special ability. The very few side quests are all piled together on the trading posts and are pointlessly stupid "go here, get this" type quests with rewards that have no use. They give you a command ship but there really isn't any point to having a command ship. I can't stand the terrible voice acting constantly repeating the same thing at me. There is no challenge, there is no point. This game is like a crappy time management sim that i'd expect to play on my tablet five minutes at a time.

I regret my purchase. So much...

This is a WARNING. What I am going to describe was true for me, but it may or may not be true for you.

Firstly, the game is quite pretty, and the gameplay itself is fine (if, frankly speaking, a bit simplistic). You will have a fairly relaxed time here. You may even have fun. I did.

Until I discovered these facts:-

1. In the game, there are cosmetic and FUNCTIONAL aspects which can be unlocked through gaining points for the Ubisoft Club. So, no micro-transactions malarkey. Yay, right? BUT...

2. Sometime in 2020, Ubisoft moved its DRM from UPlay to Ubisoft Connect ("UC"). They unlocked all the UPlay rewards. Yay, right? BUT...

3. Because Ubisoft done goofed on the move from UPlay to UC, what is unlocked in UC is NOT actually unlocked in your game.

This means, essentially, that parts of your game may remain locked, and you literally have no way of unlocking those parts. You cannot unlock those parts through gameplay, nor can you even micro-transaction your way out of it (as reprehensible as that is).

So, this is a WARNING. You can gamble of yourself being lucky, and avoiding this nonsense. You can even gamble on Ubisoft fixing this problem. But I wouldn't play Russian Roulette, if I were you.

And frankly, this would have been an immediate refund, but I can't because Steam is an ass and won't even listen to you if you have more than 2 hours' game time.

This is what Ubisoft support said: "We can confirm there is a known issue with legacy rewards offered through Ubisoft Connect at this time. The rest of the game should be working well otherwise however. " Because yeah, sure, having some functionality permanently locked means "game should be working well otherwise".

I have been playing for 12 hours in hope of an unlock, only to find that I am trapped in a room with no windows, no doors, and dare I say it, no lock. DON'T LET THIS BE YOU.

I thought all the Ubisoft Connect review bombs were probably crazy, usually people just complain about having to use two platforms and its often just an extra splash screen and a piece of extra software you didn't need.

Boy was I wrong.

Ubisoft Connect is a broken piece of garbage that doesn't work 95% of the time. It requires sometimes 4-5 exact same prompts to launch the game, it is CONSTANTLY updating almost every day (why? they aren't fixing it). It does not matter how many times you say "Remember Me" when logging in, it will forget your login credentials on at least a weekly basis. It fails to sync cloud saves the majority of the time. Ubisoft Connect's UPLAY store is broken in game (it says you have everything unlocked in the store, in game everything is locked).

Seriously, as a Canadian, I'm ashamed this company operates in Canada. They're an embarrassment, they honestly think running Ubisoft Connect alongside Steam makes them look good? No it only highlights how incompetently designed your platform is by showing how it breaks almost every other launch of the game, while Steam works flawlessly.

Is the game good? Sure but Ubisoft Connect WILL drive you crazy, even if you are otherwise enjoying your time with the game.

Ubisoft Connect tells me I have no internet.
Ubisoft Connect is wrong.
Ubisoft Connect prevents me from playing the game.
Ubisoft Connect has determined that I shall never buy another Ubisoft game.

Ultimate Edition Review: Wall of Text edition! Updated as of 8/5/2017

In my opinion, this game is not recommended at full price compared to what its predecessors have. This game is also a tough sell. The only version that is recommended is the Ultimate edition.

I am starting with combat because in my opinion with the changes it should not be in. Anno’s 2205 combat is weaker compared to its past installments. Since there was a lot of changes made to trade routes, what ships you interact with, and now it’s a multisession singeplayer experience with different factions of your corporation on different maps. It has defeated why any combat should be in the game in the first place. It’s true the Anno franchise focus is not on combat but it’s past titles had purpose for it being in. With the new formula combat is just tack on feature. On the bright side you don't have to worry about pirates in the very begining of the game. You do have to worry about attacks with the frontier dlc but you don't have defensive structures or cool toys. Just a navy you have to call in to your sector. The game could have benefited if the feature was cut completely and resources + time could have been spent elsewhere. Also, the combat is force upon you for getting special resources.

Trade Routes are set up in the menu as always with some changes of course. You do not need a shipyard to build different ships to haul items for your citizens. You also don’t need to purchase the ship with currency and resources. It just goes onto your money budget expense. Also, you can only transfer one item per ship per island where in past games you can do multiple items and set it up for multiple islands.

The level design decent at best. I like the cool sector affects and special missions that get you special bonuses. Other than that, compared to its predecessors the game could use a map editor with community driven content to help the game replay value. Since they took out random map generation even though it did not make significant variety changes in the maps. It was enough to help the replay value of the game.

Note: Cities Skylines is a different city game but it offers tons of replay value with community driven content. Blue bytes should have taken note of this before making it a complete singeplayer experience. Not having community driven content when Cities Skylines does makes it hard to compete in the market. Ubisoft should have at least let them implement steam workshop support.

The NPCs interaction is weak sauce compared it predecessors. In Anno 2205 NPC interaction is mostly through quests, stock market, and trade with certain ones of course. Very limited where as in past games you compete not just in stock market but resources, military power, trade, and land. You also had diplomacy. This adds to another reason to remove combat.

The Orbital building is underwhelming. Instead of taking advantage that in space you can build in whatever direction you want you are limited to a 2D building plane. I had a lot more fun being amazed at building things on the moon. Building the Artic, Temperate, and tundra regions is also a lot of fun. This dies out with the limited map variety.

The different factions in your corporation require different regions. Scientists in tundra + Artic regions, employees in Temperate region, Engineers on the moon. All contribute to research on the Orbital station you built if you did not get too bored building it. This contributes to a problem the new anno game has compared to past games. Building variety in your main city. Past games you had three factions with different looking buildings in your main city. This is no longer the case.
This brings me to another main problem I have with this game, the multisession. You must load into every map to make a supply chain to satisfy and advance your faction in another region. You did not have this in other games. While I like making big cities. The tradeoffs they made to make big cities in this game was not worth it my opinion. I also notice they recycled assets from Anno 2070. While recycled is not unheard of. Some of the ways they do it looks bad.
Overall Anno 2205 is not a bad game. I like it but it has its faults. Something I would like to recommend at full price even to help the developers but compared to what you get in past games. You get your moneys worth with replay value in past installments. This could have been easily countered by mod support since they made this a singleplayer only experience.

Funfact for those who do not know who argue negative reviews make huge impacts on sales:
A study was done by the Susquehanna financial groups video game journal as well other studies have concluded there is little to no correlation between reviews and the resulting sale preformance. Aparently to some people this is not case though and think this one review will destory the frachise.

This review is overall is a work in progress.