Anno 117: Pax Romana Feature Scores
Explore all 77 feature scores for Anno 117: Pax Romana, organized into pros and cons.
Scores by Feature
Summary
77 reviewed features-
Very positive 4.5-5.024 (31%)
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Positive 3.5-4.432 (42%)
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Neutral 2.5-3.411 (14%)
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Negative 1.5-2.410 (13%)
Pros
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Visuals are one of the clearest strengths, with gorgeous cities, excellent lighting, detailed buildings, and impressive scale across both regions.
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The layered mix of city-building, logistics, trade, research, diplomacy, religion, and warfare gives the game substantial mechanical depth without abandoning accessibility.
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City-building is the product’s strongest pillar, combining intuitive placement tools, production puzzles, regional constraints, and satisfying visual growth.
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Building supply chains, balancing citizens, trading across islands, and constantly refining layouts creates an engrossing loop that repeatedly makes hours disappear.
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The game is consistently described as addictive, engrossing, and hard to put down, even by players who also find parts of it frustrating.
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Trade, production chains, workforce management, and inter-island logistics are among the game’s strongest systems, rewarding planning while still allowing cascading failures when one link breaks.
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Combat is generally satisfying and better integrated than in earlier entries, especially at sea, but it remains deliberately lighter and less tactical than a dedicated RTS.
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Cities are packed with small visual touches, lively streets, changing weather, and richly modeled architecture that reward zooming in and watching daily life.
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Most PC and console impressions are positive, with smooth performance on a range of hardware, though very large cities can still trigger slowdowns.
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Road tools, diagonal layouts, island networks, and attractive province maps make expansion easy to read and satisfying to plan.
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The orchestral soundtrack is widely praised for supporting long planning sessions and shifting naturally between peaceful building and conflict.
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Research and progression are flexible and rewarding, with Discovery Tree choices and less rigid citizen advancement encouraging different builds across playthroughs.
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Layout and logistics repeatedly turn into satisfying spatial puzzles, as players juggle building effects, production chains, and efficient neighborhood design.
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The Roman and Celtic regions are convincingly realized through architecture, culture, weather, politics, and everyday activity, giving the setting real identity.
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Latium and Albion feel strongly differentiated through weather, lighting, sound, and architecture, creating a calm but vivid historical atmosphere.
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The game generally feels polished and well built, but launch-era bugs and a few rough presentation elements keep it from being uniformly clean.
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The strongest emotional payoff comes from seeing a struggling settlement become a thriving city and feeling that hard-won sense of order, growth, and mastery.
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Different regions, research paths, sandbox settings, and building strategies create strong replayability, though long-term depth may not match Anno 1800 for everyone.
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The political campaign is more engaging than expected for a city builder, but its pacing and abrupt or unfinished-feeling conclusion are recurring complaints.
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Anno 117 evolves rather than reinvents the series, with diagonal roads, land combat, culture choices, and streamlined progression adding meaningful new wrinkles.
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Cultural and political choices add flavor and replayability, though some decisions feel more cosmetic or unclear in their long-term consequences.
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Naval battles earn especially strong praise, while land battles are simpler; together they add welcome strategic tension without overtaking city-building.
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Latium and Albion can feel like substantially different games, with distinct needs, resources, cultures, and visual identities that keep repeat play fresh.
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Ambient city noise, industry, crowds, and environmental effects make settlements feel busy and alive without overwhelming the player.
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Voice work is frequently praised for giving the campaign personality, although repetition and editing issues occasionally weaken delivery.
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Menus are often clearer than older Anno entries, but dense submenus, radial navigation, and buried information can still create friction.
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Sharing cities, resources, research, and workload makes co-op a natural fit for Anno 117’s sprawling management demands.
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The Roman and Celtic art direction is a standout, pairing strong architecture with richly detailed islands and a distinctive historical look.
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Citizens visibly work, travel, socialize, and react around the city, making close-up observation feel rewarding rather than decorative.
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Camera quality ranges from very smooth zooming and panning on console to occasional difficulty controlling or taming it in dense scenes.
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Exploring the provinces is rewarding largely because the islands and cities are so attractive, with Roman and British landscapes giving discovery a strong visual payoff.
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The core Anno identity remains intact while the Roman setting and quality-of-life changes refresh the formula rather than replacing it.
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Lighting, weather, day-night changes, and environmental effects strongly reinforce the contrast between sunny Latium and misty Albion.
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Console controls are workable and sometimes excellent, but radial menus and dense command layouts can feel slower and less precise than mouse and keyboard.
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Endless and sandbox modes are where the systems fully open up, letting players tailor difficulty, rivals, regions, and long-term building goals.
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The interface can be clean and accessible once learned, but opinions split sharply over confusing tabs, dense screens, and console-oriented navigation.
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The campaign can feel short in places, but sandbox and repeat play can stretch the overall experience into dozens or hundreds of hours.
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The sandbox endgame offers long-term empire building and military expansion that can keep a successful save going well beyond the campaign.
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Active pause is singled out as an excellent quality-of-life improvement, making large-scale management easier without sacrificing control.
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Mouse-and-keyboard support works smoothly where tested, giving console or hybrid players a more precise option for dense strategy controls.
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Research is extremely deep, with broad economic, civic, and military branches that force meaningful specialization instead of letting one save unlock everything.
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Fast relocation, upgrading, and neighborhood redesign make it painless to correct early layout mistakes as the city evolves.
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Most experiences are stable, but a few console players encountered outright crashes; stability appears better on many PC configurations.
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Performance is often smooth, including 60-plus FPS on capable PCs and strong console frame pacing, though dense cities and handheld play can introduce stutter.
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The campaign gives its central cast enough personality and growth to make the political story more engaging than a typical city-builder tutorial.
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Cross-play is a clear strength, letting friends play together across platforms with flexible co-op and competitive options.
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The Roman era gives familiar Anno systems a fresh identity, especially through cultural choices, ancient infrastructure, and distinct regional play styles.
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Bustling citizens, detailed environments, and the ability to observe cities up close make the Roman world feel unusually alive for a strategy game.
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Mod support is a strong addition, helping extend and customize the experience beyond the base game.
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Cooperative and competitive modes add worthwhile variety, and the flexible structure makes shared empire-building especially appealing.
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The campaign can provide a strong structured introduction, gradually exposing players to trade, culture, and production before sandbox freedom opens up.
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Loading can be impressively quick on some consoles, while other setups report longer transitions or pauses as cities and regions grow.
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Useful settings include key rebinding, UI scaling, subtitles, and font choices, though the lack of a dedicated accessibility menu is a missed opportunity.
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Marcia in particular gives the campaign a more personal hook, with her struggle for authority making the governor role easier to invest in.
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Supporting characters help round out the campaign and give political decisions more personality than a purely mechanical tutorial would.
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AI governors can be easy to manipulate in some situations, which helps trade-focused play but may soften the challenge.
Cons
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Facial presentation is a notable blemish, with lip-sync and talking-head animation sometimes looking stiff, dubbed, or poorly timed.
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Campaign pacing is a recurring weakness, with slow stretches, abrupt transitions, and a conclusion that can arrive before the story fully lands.
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Tutorial quality is inconsistent: some players found the campaign helpful, while others complained about skipped steps, missing explanations, and insufficient recovery guidance.
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Steam Deck-style play has meaningful compromises, including controller issues under Linux/Proton and performance drops in larger cities.
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Online matchmaking is a clear limitation: players are restricted to people already on their friends list rather than being able to find public matches.
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Losing Ubisoft server access could temporarily remove baseline gameplay content, making connection reliability a meaningful concern.
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Post-launch DLC is a weak point so far: Prophecies of Ash drew mixed-to-negative reactions, and the current lineup was described as unremarkable.
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Important status information is not always easy to read at a glance, with missing overlays and confusing notifications making diagnosis harder than it should be.
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The Hall of Fame progression layer drew skepticism when framed as a battle-pass-style system, especially around non-cosmetic unlocks.
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Some repetition fits the slow-building appeal, but long research waits and slow shipments can tip the experience from relaxing into administrative busywork.
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Cloud-save reliability can be frustrating across devices, with one player needing workarounds before a campaign file synced correctly.
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Side quests are serviceable but not a major strength: some add flavor, while others fall back on familiar fetch tasks and are easy to ignore.
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Challenge is highly adjustable, yet newcomers can still hit punishing economic and systems spikes before the broader difficulty curve settles into place.
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Dialogue is uneven: the comedic tone can be enjoyable, but delivery and story conversations sometimes feel poorly edited or awkward.
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Online reliability is inconsistent: cross-progression can work cleanly, but connection or access problems can also prevent multiplayer from working as intended.
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Writing quality is mixed: some campaign material is engaging and well written, while the main story can lack weight or a satisfying conclusion.
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Technical cleanliness varies by platform and version: some players saw almost no issues, while others reported disruptive bugs and even game-breaking problems around launch.
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General animation quality is mixed: some console animation looks smooth, while character presentation can become stiff or awkward in close-up scenes.
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Cross-save exists, but cloud-save behavior and one-file limitations caused frustration for at least one multi-device player.
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The amount of content can make the price feel reasonable, while later pricing and DLC timing may make waiting for a deeper discount more attractive.
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The learning experience is mixed: many find this the most approachable Anno yet, while others still face a steep, punishing wall once systems begin stacking up.