Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery

Later...

Source // Nintendo

I have never played a game from the Anno series of real-time strategy city-builders, but I do know one thing about them: They're really not suited for the Nintendo DS, right? I mean... you could squash an isometric city-builder into a DS cartridge, but would you really want to? Should you?

The only Anno game the 1001 list wants us to look at is a spin-off for the Nintendo DS, Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery, claimed to be a simpler, more streamlined version, perfect for pockets.

I can't even say that it sounds like a good place to start. Surely we'll be missing out on something. Surely.

Fun Times

I'm emulating this game, and the barrier to entry is one menu option. Touch the Story Mode button and you're in, reading a barebones story of a dying King wishing to settle in the New World. But do it quickly, now, for our competition is out to do the same.

Dun dun dun! How ominous. We're told the name of the competitor Queen but not the name of our own King. I guess the details aren't important in Dawn of Discovery. Just get out there and settle, damnit.

Like many other city-builders, this game takes the approach of teaching you about it as and when it is appropriate for you to learn about something. Slowly, buildings and features will unlock for you to play around with, but for now, just try plopping down a Lumberjack to gather some wood. You won't be able to build much without wood, now, would you?

Immediately after opening up shop, the Lumberjack has a complaint to make. He wants road access to the warehouse. It's a fair point, I suppose.

Give it a little time and that road becomes the first street of our new settlement, all that wood put to use in the construction of houses, which, pleasingly, don't all look the same. Though they mostly do. But some aren't. How does the DS do it?

A bunch of objectives to follow along with can be found in the mission book, and the next is to build a fisher to feed all these new settlers.

You build things by clicking on the building icon and selecting them from a wheel. There's a housing section, production section, food section, roads and so on, each containing a whole bunch of period appropriate buildings.

Do I know what any of them do? Not a clue. In fact, throughout the game, Dawn of Discovery is happier with me just building something, than ever actually learning what it is I'm doing.

Frustrations

To be able to fit everything on the tiny Nintendo DS screens, there's so little text that you absolutely have to keep track of what all the iconography means. While the menu icons make sense - building, zoom, message log etc - the actual buildings themselves aren't the easiest to distinguish when they're represented by what are essentially pictures of themselves.

I'm told that my warehouse's sphere of influence doesn't extend to the mountains we need to mine, which makes sense. The solution is to stick a market down in the middle of the island to extend our sphere of influence to reach the mountains. Makes sense. Who am I trading with, though? There's literally nobody else on this island but me. And why don't I need a road to the market?

Dawn of Discovery often flips between being obvious and not. People like to live close to the chaple, and houses within its influence will improve quicker, turning into bigger, fancier properties and making the population happier.

In turn, they're able to be taxed more, but it was a while before I even worked out these tiny little lines next to the pictures of these settlers were sliders that I could adjust to get more money from them. Did my advisor explicity tell me to use my stylus to slide the marker? Nope. That's immersion breaking. He jut told me to adjust taxes.

Geez, Anno. That's a little on the nose. Probably exactly what happened in the colonization of the Americas, but still.. This is supposed to be a family friendly Nintendo DS game, no?

The natives will serve as thorns in our side, but we're told that somewhere on this map - beyond our island - is an expert that may be able to help ease the tensions we're having here. Time to get our exploration on.

Or not. First, we've got to put down some sugar farms and tea plantations because... thematic? I don't really know the context here. They seem to be built because they are now buildable. Great. Wouldn't mind exploring the world a bit more, though...

But we can't explore until 'her back home' has been given a bucket load of logs I need and cloth I don't have, all in return for some iron that I can't get hold of locally, and keep being told I need to have. The Queen wants 10 of each resource, but my one sheep farm can't churn out enough cloth to satisfy the demand.

My choices are to upgrade the building by clicking on an upgrade icon and merely hoping something happened - there's not a whole lot of feedback for it working unless you compare it with an un-upgraded building - or to build another farm entirely. Or both, in this case, because if I'm not low on Food (which I am), I'm low on cloth. Wood? That's bloody everywhere. Need to learn how to eat tree bark...

Like all good settlements, the tavern is built before the school, but the locals - wherever they are - still aren't happy about our presence. Can we finally be allowed to explore the wider world, please, Anno?

Two houses on the coast seem to spontaneously collapse, leaving with a shipyard-shaped hole in town. Finally, it's time to branch out.

An exploration ship takes my focus as the town continues to moan about lack of food and cloth. With two main zoom settings, issuing grand orders to your ships is a right pain in the arse, so Anno introduces the world map, and the exploration command, which allows your ship to sort of self-automate its searching en route to your chosen destination.

It took a long time to find anything, and my advisor was constantly updating me about the poor state of my settlement in the meantime. It was flourishing, and the townsfolk wanted to upgrade, but they're hungry, demanding little buggers, so every other ship command was paired with a new farm or a rebalancing of taxes.

I was desperate to find this native expert and eventually found her on an island devoid of pretty much everything.

Still hadn't bumped into any angry natives themselves, though, which was good. All I needed to do now was wait for this woman to decide to come to our island. Again, after what felt like too long, she started sailing our way.

10 tons of cloth and you'll have an answer at some point? Bloody hell, this settling lark takes a lot of effort, doesn't it?

So much effort that I decided to save the game and quit, just shy of an hour in.

Final Word

Why's that? Because while I do want to play Anno, I don't want to play this incarnation of it. This tiny, pixelly, hard to follow version, streamlined though it apparently is.

You're not playing this game for the story, and you need the right sort of mind to keep track of everything that's going on in town for your settlers to actually survive, and your advisor to shut up about the lack of food and cloth.

While it's admirable that what is traditionally a genre for big game experiences is squashed down for gaming on the go, for me, it just doesn't work. It's too cramped, it's too awkward to follow. I want massive screen resolutions where I can see more than one street at a time.

If my only video game hardware was a Nintendo DS and I absolutely needed to have a city-builder, then Dawn of Discovery ticks a lot of boxes. Plenty of possibility, simple controls, a few modes to play in... but for the everyday gamer, it's a tough sell.

A quick skim of the games library says I have two PC Anno games, including the 'actual' Anno 1701. I think I'll probably play that at some point, but this 1001 list specifically wants us to play the Nintendo DS spin-off instead, and I'm just not sure why.

Will this post be updated to say that you should play Anno 1701 on the PC instead?

Fun Facts

I don't have a fact for this DS spin-off, but the bigger Anno 1701 was at one point the most expensive German game ever made, with a budget of €10m.

Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery, developed by Keen Games, first released in 2007.

Version played: Nintendo DS, 2007, via emulation.