Anno: Create A New World

We’re always knocking Wii games for being dumbed down, patronising and simplistic, but having now played Anno, one of the most complex Wii games yet, we think we may have to redefine our terms. We realise now that Wii games are simplistic not just to pander to casual tastes, but out of necessity. Perhaps it is possible to produce an in-depth RTS that sits well on the Wii, but Keen Games hasn’t managed it here despite what we’re well willing to believe was a genuinely concerted effort.

Anno isn’t a complicated RTS compared to many of the hardcore examples you’ll find on the PC, but underneath the friendly, cartoonish exterior it’s more than deep enough to intimidate the average Wii owner. And this, we assume, is why Keen has chosen to make the learning curve of the story mode so shallow you can barely feel it going up. A reasonable decision you’d think, but the upshot is that using this softly, softly approach to introduce you to spoon-feed you every feature of the game one at a time takes an unreasonably long time. The story mode is so slow and so patronising, and is so terrified of letting you off the reigns that you’ll spend hours feeling like you’re just doing what you’re told and not what you want to do.

Fortunately, there is another mode – Continuous Play. Unfortunately, it’s in this mode that it becomes clear that slowness and linearity are not the Story Mode’s worst crimes. After about half an hour of trying to make it alone against the CPU in Continuous Play, you’ll have learned the hard way that, despite appearing to be painstakingly thorough, the Story Mode tutorials, in their desperation not to put you off with unsightly factors and variables, have glossed over much of the games’ key mechanics, leaving you having to figure them out for yourself.

For example, story mode tells you that your warehouses and marketplaces are important because any building producing goods needs to be near them because that’s where the goods go. But it shies away from explaining how the process of goods distribution works, or what all the different icons and bars in the warehouse status screen mean and how they need to be used to monitor the production and distribution of various goods throughout your colonies. This is the stuff that really needs explaining but Anno, with one eye set firmly on the casual Wii market, prefers to pretend it isn’t as complicated as it is.

Apart from Keen’s fluffed effort to target a deep game at a casual audience, Anno has other difficulties settling itself on the Wii. As in most RTS games, it’s important to build your settlements as rapidly as possible, but this doesn’t suit the wayward imprecision of the Wiimote at all well. It’s all too easy to place things in the wrong spot, which is a serious issue in a game that’s all about careful management of space. One that doesn’t have an undo feature.