Ancient Rome — with its monumental architecture, layered culture, and courtly machinations — is an almost inevitable backdrop for Ubisoft’s city-builder Anno 117: Pax Romana. After several hours of play, I found the game’s obsessive city-planning demands, penchant for lavender-scented pleasures, and occasional disastrous fires make the experience feel unexpectedly true to period.
Anno 117: Pax Romana is beautiful. Shorelines shimmer, crags rise dramatically, and the vegetation and wildlife add texture to every scene. The buildings are especially impressive: each residential tier arrives in seven distinct variants, replete with gardens, amphorae, patterned tiles, fountains, and food-laden tables. Up close you’ll spot worn hides, sun-bleached timber, and a furtive cat — while the showpiece is undoubtedly the ostentatious pleasure barge that nods to Caligula’s famed Nemi ships.
I tested ultra-high visuals against medium settings and, apart from degraded crop textures, the change was subtle — roofs and streets remain satisfying even on modest settings. Crowd density is critical for a bustling city, and even the lowest setting retains vibrancy: carts roll by, individual trees sway, and architectural details remain readable. For me the ideal view is a mid-zoom: enough proximity to savor visual flourishes while keeping strategic oversight intact.
Where the polish slips is the user interface. The UI feels bland and generic — largely white icons on a pale blue field with no Roman flourishes — and the mini-map’s odd decision to embed a square inside a circular frame feels like a wasted opportunity for elegant design coherence.
That said, the UI’s structural clarity is a strength. Key information sits along the top, primary menus on the left, and three large action buttons separate troops, ships, and buildings along the bottom. Quick-access icons for roads, residences, and warehouses keep routine tasks efficient. The game’s resource chains, however, require some acclimation: to build a pig farm you must navigate to the relevant social tier (plebeians), select the end product that consumes pig-derived goods, then locate the pig icon in the chain. This web of interdependencies is classic Anno design — rewarding once learned, but initially labyrinthine.
Speaking of onboarding, the tutorial is a weak point. Despite familiarity with other builders, the early objectives felt opaque: tasked to place a woodcutter and sawmill, I wasn’t shown where to find them. Resource shortages produced no clear alerts; I had to discover the statistics menu on my own. Rather than interactive, guided steps, the tutorial offers terse pop-ups that tell you what to do without showing how.
Once past the learning curve, the game clicks. Shared warehouses and the ability to freely relocate buildings let you concentrate on island-wide logistics and citizen welfare instead of petty micromanagement. Area effects — lavender fields that boost happiness, sandalmakers that spur population growth — encourage thoughtful district planning without becoming onerous.
City expansion is judiciously balanced. I was amused to learn that “city status” can be a source of unhappiness: bigger isn’t always better. Rapid expansion raises discontent in ways that force you to weigh growth against stability, which adds a satisfying strategic tension.
Beyond municipal headaches — sickness, civil unrest, and the occasional conflagration that recalls Rome’s darker days — the campaign delivers a surprisingly compelling narrative. You can opt for endless mode, but meeting recurring characters and unfolding their arcs deepens the historical atmosphere. Campaign objectives aren’t strictly timed, which frees you to pursue the plot or simply refine your city at your own pace.
Switching regions from Latium to the rain-soaked Celtic Albion introduces fresh citizens, goods, and governance dilemmas: do you assimilate or preserve local customs? The change of scenery is welcome, though the game’s preference for rectilinear town grids favors Latium. Diagonal roads are present, but the engine doesn’t smoothly adapt building models to awkward triangular lots or round plazas (take note, Manor Lords fans), so naturalistic, winding towns are harder to realize in Albion.
I haven’t finished the campaign or engaged deeply in warfare yet, but I’m reluctant to leave the year 117. A game that combines visual splendor, period authenticity, strategic depth, and an engaging narrative is a rare find — and Anno 117: Pax Romana delivers on all counts.
Source: Polygon
