Intelligent Game Reviews

Developer Sunflowers has the honor of having created the game that has sold more copies than any other game in German speaking territories in the world. It isn’t Doom or Civilization or Command & Conquer but a strategy offering called Anno 1602. The game has now been released in North America with the name 1602 A.D., after a substantial delay and without much fanfare partly due to financial troubles at publisher GT Interactive.

The Basics

1602 A.D. is a bit like SimCity and a bit like Pharaoh. At it’s core it is a city building game played in real time. There are standalone scenarios with specific goals and linked scenarios that form short campaigns of typically four missions. There is also a sandbox scenario with no fixed endpoint where you can do anything you want.

Regardless of scenario, you begin the game with one or more ships and some resources. You then explore various islands to find out what sort of crops they can grow and whether or not ore is present. You then can build a dock and unload your ships into the dock and begin constructing your town.

The game has a moderately involved economic model. Raw materials are farmed or mined and then taken by carts to other locations for manufacture into goods. Goods are distributed to your populace via markets and can be sold to free trader merchants or other countries by taking them via ship to another port.

In addition to farming and manufacturing sites, you must build houses for your residents. Each type of location, be it a fisherman’s hut that generates food for your people, a woodsman hut that generates lumber to build things, or farms that raise sheep to allow weavers to create cloth, costs money to run. You begin with a fixed amount of cash in hand and must raise more via taxation. The more people you have in your city the more taxes you can generate.

Each house you build can be upgraded by the people themselves. This takes various resources, but the more it is upgraded the more people you can have living there and the more you can tax them per person. In order to upgrade, a house needs access to various goods. At first this means they need food and cloth and access to a place of worship. Later, they may demand many goods and services.

Growing population of various different types (citizens, merchants, settlers, etc.) will allow you to construct new building types including mines, quarries, tool makers, cannon foundries, shipyards, etc. These let you train soldiers, build ships of war, and defend yourself from pirates or conquer your enemies. Combat takes place in real time, though combat is not the focus of the game.

Controlling the action was easy enough, everything can be done easily with the mouse. Placing new buildings is as simple as selecting the building from the menu and placing it by clicking on the map. Provided you have coverage from your dock and markets you can build a building anywhere. Roads allow you to move goods and troops. My biggest complaint with the interface is that there was no Undo function if you clicked in the wrong place.

There are three speed settings and a pause, though you cannot issue orders while paused or even see the map. In general pacing is reasonable and the game is quite engrossing. I did find that it was a little hard overall, the economy is a challenge to manage since not every island can grow all crops and thus trade is vital. This would not be so difficult but invariably pirates prey on you and getting a big enough city with enough high level residents to support a fleet to fend them off is a problem.

Overall I enjoyed the game quite a bit. It wasn’t as colorful or fun as the similar Pharaoh but it held my interest and I liked the setting.

Graphics, Sound, etc.

Despite the limitation of 256 color graphics the main interface is attractive and colorful. The terrain, buildings and little workers all look nice. Animations are generally good, though the game certainly doesn’t shine when compared to the recent, and somewhat similar, Pharaoh. The game can be played in pretty much any screen resolution you desire and supports three zoom levels to control the action.

Special effects are nothing spectacular really… the volcano looks rather silly, the animation for the plague are often too small to notice on the main screen, and battle scenes are rather basic. This holds true of the very short event movies as well. They aren’t bad at all, just not state of the art or particularly interesting to look at. You can turn them off to speed play if you desire.

The manual is a mixed bag. Useful information on how the city evolves and when various structures can be built as well as interdependencies between industry and raw materials are poorly explained other than in the helpful appendices which contain nice charts. The basic play modes are better explained in the interactive tutorial missions, but they don’t really go far enough to do without the manual. Overall it was adequate, if only barely, but you will be left scratching your head from time to time.

The Verdict

1602 A.D. is an interesting game but not without flaws. The basic model of city building is good but it’s rather more difficult than it needs to be and the combat system really hinders play. As a single player game in the mode of Caesar or SimCity it has a certain charm but it lacks any real staying power.

1602 A.D. Screenshots

A moderately complex economic model is reminiscent of that seen in Pharaoh.	The attractive graphics and animation can be viewed in different zoom levels and resolutions.
The included editor lets you create complete scenarios including mission objectives.	The SimCity similarities run deep in many ways… including the occasional natural disaster to deal with.

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