Anno 1404: Dawn of Discovery Review

Dawn of Conclusions

We like Anno 1404 quite a bit then, as you can probably tell. It's pretty to look at, reasonably easy to pick up aside from a few hiccups, and the pacing of the campaign mode is enough to ease you into things and ready you for the endless game and scenario modes.

That said, Anno 1404 isn’t a game without flaws and, to anybody looking for something more than just a singleplayer strategy game with a sandbox mode, Anno 1404 could well disappoint. There’s no multiplayer – that’s basically what we’re driving at.

There’s an online element to Anno 1404, that much is true – but the specific element that is online isn’t actually an element you can play. Instead, it’s system called ‘Gateway to the World’ and it lets you share your profile page, screenshots and savegames with other people who sign up to the system.

And that’s OK, we guess, but we’re not sure we really see the point. It reminds us of the similar system that Eidos put into Hitman: Blood Money to let users compare scores, but the crucial difference here is that there’s no real achievements to funnel player focus, nor drive to try anything other than play the game the way it was meant to be played.


Besides, you’ve really got to ask who might want to download screenshots and savegames from your collection, honestly. Weirdos, that’s who.

The lack of a multiplayer mode is a real weakness for Anno 1404, as the strategy genre is really one that thrives in an online or LAN arena and, for a lot of people, is the only thing that matters in a strategy game. Without it, there’s a large portion of the market who might decide to just completely skip by Anno 1404 as, once the campaign is done and you’ve realised how shallow the endless game really is, there’s not much more entertainment left to extract from the game.

And the fact that the title as a whole is risking so much by the absence of a single mode is a real shame, honestly, as despite it all Anno 1404 is actually an incredibly direct and fun game to play.


There’s nothing fundamentally new in the game design and it’s still the familiar formula of laying down huts that upgrade to houses, which unlock more factories and facilities, then your houses turn into mansions and so on and so on. The system isn’t even refined into something new or balanced all that perfectly either, but it’s a proven formula and it isn’t broken and it’s all presented quite nicely and you’re not going to drown under a flood of new and difficult features, nor are you going to be at-odds with a boring game design.

It would be easy to make Anno 1404 a better game. A dash of multiplayer here, a second campaign or a unique feature or two there and our opinion of Anno 1404 would start to raise quite dramatically. Likewise though, all it would take to make us loathe the game would be to shed the impressive graphics and tilt the pacing one way or the other – Anno 1404 is so generic on the whole that it exists just a nudge away from either opinion.

Without getting that nudge though, it’s hard to know what to make of Anno 1404 beyond the simple fact that it’s colourful, offers a fair amount of challenge, but isn’t really something you’re likely to invest a serious amount of time in. We said at the beginning of all this that it’s hard to get really excited about a strategy game that doesn’t have big robots and ‘splosions. That’s still true, even though there are few really serious faults with the Anno 1404 beyond the lack of online play.

Score Guide