Anno 1404

It’s been a while since I played an Anno game, and the blog search is being stupid but I think I wrote about Anno 1503 once, but I bought Anno 1404 in January and played it for the first time today. ~90mins for the first two Campaign missions. It’s really nice. I know it came out in 2009, but it looks kinda new (except the menus), especially when being compared to Anno 1503 from 2002 or Anno 1602 from 1998 – and those where the only ones I played, although I think I looked at 2011’s Anno 2070 once at someone else’s computer…

So yeah, the choice was between spending 30 bucks on the recent Anno 1800 with no immediate plan to play it or spend 3 or 4 bucks on the 10 year old one. Easy choice, and now, 2 weeks later I installed it and played for a bit, and those 2 missions were enough for today, so I’m happy. Usually these series tend to evolve into completely complicated and overblown things (this is how 2070 looked to me), so often I am a lot happier with the older titles. But we’ll see how many hours I’ll spend on this one, I usually leave them after 10 hours, at least that’s what happened the last 15 years – I played *a lot* of 1503 at launch, but these times seem to have passed for me, I can only stand a certain type of game for a whole day on the weekend, or even a full 4-5h session on a work day evening.