On an over all scale of 1 to 10, I rate this game a 5. This is coming from someone that has played this game extensively and spent a goodOn an over all scale of 1 to 10, I rate this game a 5. This is coming from someone that has played this game extensively and spent a good deal of real money on it over 2.5 years time since the game went into open beta on May 14, 2013. So here is the Good, the Bad and The Ugly ...
The Good:
* You can play for free the core of the game including reaching 4k imperials and unlocking all required buildings.
* The community is generally nice and helpful (at least on the U.S. server and this is the only server I can recommend from personal experience). I believe the helpfulness comes from the fact that many players are older and more mature in their dealings with people in general (or it could simply be because the game is so slow that they help others to keep themselves busy). Truthfully the only reason I kept playing the game past a month or so was from my liking of the people in general, not the game itself.
The Bad:
* You can play for free but please note that as a free player it will take you many months to do this and you will spend 99% of your time waiting for this and that to happen.
* This is a Ubisoft/bb game. They endlessly try to sell you 100% of anything that exists in the game without telling you you can earn those things for free (mostly). I suppose there is nothing wrong with this but be careful what you spend rubies on.
The Ugly:
* This game is generally laggy and unstable. For example many cannot even load the game without sitting at loading screens for up to 5 min or longer with nothing seemingly happening (this happens to me regularly).
* Zone Locks. Anno online has some issues they have never fixed since the start of the game nearly 3 years ago. One of those are Zone Locks. It is possible for your game for no reason to zonelock. This
means it had a critical or wild error and it "temp" locked. It might unlock, but I have seen in some cases where they are never ever fixed and although they "Might" give you some rubies, the months of time you spend doing things will all be lost permanently, and the pay back (if you get any) in rubies will not be at all fair.
* The game is filled with bugs that have also been around since pretty much the life of the game. Ubisoft/bb does not fix most bugs ever.
Additional notes of importance:
* Ubisoft bought this game in it's completed state as a builder but ubisoft never did anything to improve or add more "building" to the game. In 2.5 years all they have done is add Monuments (each 1 building takes about 1-2 months to build) so this is not building in any true sense. Also they have events in which you can spend a week doing pointless stuff (all of which will be deleted at the end of
the event) and your reward? Maybe 1 or 2 buildings which are only slightly better than the ones you can build for free.
* Finally, this has nothing to do with the original Anno series of games (which are all great games by the way). It looks like the old Anno series games but that is just artwork made to resemble the original games.… Expand
