Anno 2070

Bigger, better and in the future. Like Anno 1404, Anno 2070 is a real-time strategy(RTS) game that focuses more on people and economy management and less on the fighting.

Release Date

Pros

Just like Anno 1404, the music for Anno 2070 is excellent.

Although an Internet connection is not required for single-player games, being connected does provide extra things like, daily missions and boosts to your single-player games.

The game maybe very large and complex, but everything is well explained in the single player campaign. It is pretty much a giant tutorial with a fairly interesting story to follow. If you are brave you can also start with a continuous game and there are prompts to help you learn the game. There is also plenty of information in the game’s data log which you can access any time to learn specific things. All of these factors makes Anno 2070 much easier to learn than Anno 1404.

Anno 2070 adds more depth to the Anno game style literally. Going underwater plays a big role in Anno 2070. There are structures to be built and resources to be gathered. Of course you have to unlock the submarine technology first and there is the extra element of managing your underwater facilities to cooperate with your surface facilities.

Anno 2070 is not only better, but also bigger than Anno 1404. There is more of everything that made Anno 1404 so good.

Cons

You cannot play Anno 2070 without a Uplay account. So even if you do not want to play online you must still create a Uplay account just to play the game offline.

When you first start the game, you have to create a new profile and the profile name cannot be changed once set.

There is so much information to read and yet the fonts are so very small.  Whether playing on a screen with a resolution of 1366×768 or 1920×1080, the fonts always appear small. There is no way to change the font size and playing on a lower than native screen resolution does not help either.

Every time you start the game, the game does not start. No, it launches Uplay and then you have to click play to start the game. Annoying!

Uplay has to get updates quite often, but after one update around November 2014, Uplay kept crashing on start up. I could not play Anno 2070 for quite a while thanks to Uplay.   There was an error message that said I can try reinstalling the game, but that was too annoying. At least Anno 1404 does not have this Uplay rubbish.

The autopatcher does not work properly if you have the Deep Ocean expansion. I encountered this problem when installing the game from Uplay. When Anno 2070 starts up, it says an addon was activated and it needs to reboot to update. The only choice is to click the reboot button. On clicking reboot, the game exits and the autopatcher runs. When the game starts up again, the same message appears. It keeps failing and repeating.

Luckily, this solution from Ubisoft works. Just download the offline patch, disconnect from the Internet and install the patch with administrator rights. Then reconnect to the Internet and start the game. It will give the same message about rebooting and updating again, but this time the reboot and update will work and the restart will actually get into the game good and proper.  Note that my anti-virus flagged the patch as malware, but only after it installed.

Other Points

There are three factions, but you can only choose from two of them. The third factions tacks on to your side once you have satisfied certain conditions. This is similar to how the Orient side tacks on to your Occident side in Anno 1404.

Same like Anno 1404, the game moves very slowly. Apart from the campaign missions, other missions can take a very long time to complete. You choose goal(s) for continuous games which affects how long the game can take.

Biases

Reviewed version 2.00.7780 of the game.

I have not played any multiplayer games. I have completed the standard single player campaign and played a few continuous games.  Still lots of content to get through with the Deep Ocean expansion, daily missions and bonus missions.

I really liked Anno 1404.

DRM

This was stated on the GameFly website:
This video game is protected by the digital rights management software SOLIDSHIELD from TAGES S.A.S which limits the amount of concurrent installations of the game. During the installation and/or the first launch, an online connection is required to unlock the game. HIGH SPEED INTERNET ACCESS AND A VALID UPLAY ACCOUNT ARE REQUIRED TO ACCESS ONLINE FEATURES, PLAY ONLINE OR UNLOCK EXCLUSIVE CONTENT. SUCH CONTENT MAY ONLY BE UNLOCKED ONE SINGLE TIME WITH A UNIQUE KEY. YOU MUST BE AT LEAST 13 TO CREATE A UPLAY ACCOUNT WITHOUT PARENTAL CONSENT. UBISOFT MAY CANCEL ACCESS TO ONE OR MORE SPECIFIC ONLINE FEATURES UPON A 30-DAY PRIOR NOTICE PUBLISHED AT www.anno.ubi.com.

On first launch, a serial number must be entered. Then the game phones home to activate.

You must have a UPlay account regardless of whether you want to play online or not. After I created a Uplay account and actually got the game started, it asked for my activation key again in-game. This time it said it will link the game to the UPlay account.

Patches

Every time you start the game, it launches the autopatcher. The game does not start unless it is fully up to date.

The autopatcher download speed is quite slow, so better to download the patches manually via the web.

Offline Patcher 2.00 – I installed this patch first. After installing, the game still ran the autopatcher to download several patches to update the game and the Uplay program. After each patch, it would restart itself to get the next patch.

Minimum Requirements (as stated in Readme.txt)

• Supported OS : Windows® XP SP3 / Windows Vista® SP2 /Windows 7® SP1
• Processor: Intel Core®2 Duo E4400 @ 2.0 Ghz or AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ @ 2.0GHZ
• RAM: 2 GB Windows XP® – Vista® – Windows 7®
• Video Card: 512 MB DirectX® 9.0–compliant card with Shader Model 4.0 or higher (Radeon HD2600XT / GeForce 8800GT or better)
• Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 compliant sound card
• DirectX Version: DirectX® June2010 or newer (libraries included on disc)
• DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM dual-layer drive
• Hard Drive Space:
• Peripherals Supported: Keyboard, mouse

Computer Played On

• Windows 7 64 bit.
• Intel Core i5 2.3GHz
• 4GB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M 1GB RAM
• Conexant SmartAudio with egg speakers or earphones. Or Logitech G35.
• Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.

Anno 2070 also works fine on my Windows 10 PC.