The Anno series has been all over the modern era since its debut in the late 90s, exploring nearly every aspect of the Age of Exploration and even dipping its toes into the future, both distant and less so. Now, Ubisoft Mainz is taking the series closer to BC than ever before by going all the way back to Ancient Rome in Anno 117: Pax Romana, and bringing with it a host of new quality-of-life and onboarding features to help newbies like me start building from the ground up.
Anno 117: Pax Romana Campaign and Onboarding
The biggest draw for players who aren’t exceptionally experienced with the genre is likely going to be the game’s Campaign, a feature returning from Anno 1800 that eases them into the game more easily than jumping right into the main sandbox mode. There are two selectable characters, a brother and a sister, and your choice will be granted a small island on which to start building your very own sub-empire from scratch.
Core Gameplay Loop: Population and Buildings
The game’s tutorialization quickly convinced me of how easy it would be to understand, with a cycle that is easy to learn and expands at a reasonable pace. Broadly speaking, the game’s core concepts are your Population and your Buildings, and the two feed into each other to create a satisfying loop. Your population will start as Liberti, historically freed slaves. Once you can meet their living needs, you can upgrade them one residence at a time into Plebeians, who are capable of performing more skilled work. Plebeians can be upgraded once their needs are met, and so on, but any new residence you build will start from the bottom and need to be upgraded, so you can’t just ignore the needs of the Liberti once you’re a few steps above that.
Buildings have perceptible effects on the area around them, and some have additional requirements, such as being built on or near specific terrain or needing to be surrounded by designated farmland. Each of your gathering buildings will require a specific population to staff it and will produce resources that need to be transported to warehouses and then to production buildings to create your goods. Strategic placement is important but also easy to grasp with the game’s strong visual presentation, allowing you to easily pick up and relocate your buildings at will to adjust.
A Note on Military and Strategic Placement
The need for strategic placement also comes with my only real stumble during my extended preview, though – you won’t unlock any of the game’s military features until about an hour into the campaign. It doesn’t offer any guidance before that about how you may want to position your early buildings to leave room for things like walls. This is the kind of thing that would probably be obvious to dedicated genre fans. Still, as Anno 117 is clearly looking to attract a new audience as well, it was rather frustrating to realize that I would need to shuffle most of my early buildings and layout to accommodate military placement. You won’t be punished for not doing so right away, as the game clearly indicates when you’re at risk of attack or other stressors like civil unrest, fires, or disease. Still, where medical and emergency buildings are easy to pluck a few houses up to build quickly, you’ll need solid protection that could have been unlocked sooner.
Final Preview Impressions
My own obvious mistakes aside, Anno 117 seems like an ideal entry point to one of gaming’s most venerated franchises, emphasizing a gradual introduction over throwing new players into the deep end. Not many games in the genre include a story mode. Still, it’s an inspired choice that gives Pax Romana a more natural feeling of progression than many of its contemporaries. It prepares its audience to jump into the freeform mode with the confidence that they know what they’re doing instead of attempting to tutorialize them on the fly. The game is less than a month away, but it already looks gorgeous and more than ready for primetime – we’ll have to see if it sticks the landing.
Anno 117: Pax Romana releases on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series consoles, and PC via Steam and Ubisoft Connect on November 13, 2025.
