• Summary

• Reviews

• News
• Images
• Videos
• Downloads
• Hints & Cheats

Genre: Real-Time Strategy Publisher: Ubisoft Developer: Related Designs Players: 1-2

By Lachlan (29th Jun 2009)

Anno 1404, or Dawn of Discovery as it is being marketed in North America, is a game that combines economic simulation, city-building and real-time strategy. This probably doesn’t sound overly exciting to gamers looking for the next Grizzled Space Marines in Space Part 7 twitch-opus, but developers Ubisoft and Related Designs have managed to make a complex, deeply-layered game that is also fun and accessible, even to the less hardcore of us.

Dawn of Discovery is the fourth instalment of the Anno series, following on from the 2006 release of Anno 1701. Much like the previous games, this title sees you taking charge of a non-specific European country, which you must guide to fame and fortune while colonising the Orient. The crusades serve as a backdrop, and other historical events and characters play a role in the story, but the game is more about colourful characters and fun game mechanics. If you’re looking for a super-realistic, historically accurate depiction of the era, you’ll want to look elsewhere.

Whatever you want to call it, Dawn of Discovery is one exceedingly pretty title. The hand-painted introduction is gorgeous, as are the loading screens for each level. Small details abound when you’re actually playing the game, from whales and dolphins frolicking in the deep blue seas, to flocks of birds and other wildlife populating landscape. Buildings are vibrantly coloured, as are the different peasants you find wandering your villages. Performance remained acceptable throughout, even when rendering some of the game’s more crowded cities. The colourful characters which populate the game world are well animated, looking like they just stepped out of a Pixar movie.

The complexity of titles like Dawn of Discovery can be daunting to the casual gamer. The logistics of building a self-sufficient colony are quite complex, and opening the “build” menu to be confronted with two-dozen different mines, markets, traders and huts is nothing short of intimidating. Fortunately, the game is quite forgiving. The tool-tips and pop-ups will tell you when things aren’t working as they should, along with a few suggestions to get things humming again. Placing a building in the wrong spot is no reason to despair, as it can be knocked back down with a few clicks of the mouse.

While there are a few actions you’ll fumble with at first, setting up trade routes with your fleet and establishing new colonies can be done with ease after a little bit of experimentation. The developers are to be credited for creating such a clear and concise interface, and the learning curve isn’t too steep either. Anybody who has wrestled with the interfaces of other strategy games knows how frustrating it can be when you have to scour the manual every few minutes just to accomplish basic tasks.

Guiding a colony from a collection of peasant dwellings to a sprawling, self-sufficient economic paradise brings out the inner capitalist like nothing else. As with other city-building games, the game really comes down to striking the right balance between civilian dwellings, food and entertainment for the populace, and producing goods for trade. Different regions have different natural resources, along with variable soil properties. These “fertilities” determine the kind of crops you can grow in each area, a clever way of encouraging you to keep spreading out.



Exploration is the key in Dawn of Discovery. From the very first training mission you are encouraged to scour every corner of the map in order to find extra resources and unlock secret quests. Steering a boat down toward one of the reefs that dot the map might bring you across some extra tools, or perhaps a shipwreck. Clicking on one of your allies’ buildings might prompt you to search for something, say castaways clinging to barrels out in the middle of the ocean. Bring them back to the harbour and you’ll earn a reward, which you can put toward more buildings or trading ships. The end of each chapter of the single-player campaign sees you scored on how many quests you accomplished, and while not all of these missions are essential, they give the obsessives amongst us reason to go back and take another crack at anything we might have missed.

The game ships with a single-player campaign, a “sandbox” continuous mode, and a few custom scenarios. There’s no multiplayer, but the option to share savegames and screenshots is built into the game’s front end. While the continuous play mode is a nice way to experiment with city-building, the campaign is really the main attraction. Each chapter of the campaign increases the scope of the game somewhat, serving as a tutorial in the early stages, before gradually ramping up the difficulty and the complexity of objectives. While early quests are as simple as building a set number of houses or delivering resources to a certain location, later missions demand a lot more organisation. You’ll be building items that require multiple resources, and setting up trade routes between lots of different locations.

At the end of each chapter in the campaign, the map resets itself for your next set of tasks. This somewhat disrupts the continuity of the single-player campaign, particularly if you’ve spent time building up resources in different areas of the map. Sure, there are probably balance issues to be considered, but I’m surprised the developers couldn’t find another way around this, maybe by more carefully limiting the resources you have to accomplish each chapter.



Although it isn’t a game play issue as such, something has to be said for the copy protection Ubisoft have deemed necessary for Dawn of Discovery. They’ve taken the stunningly unpopular route of including an installation limit, meaning that you can only install the game on three different machines before having to contact the publisher for more activations. Legality of this practice aside, I’m yet to hear a compelling reason why such draconian methods are still necessary, or serve as any real kind of deterrent to pirates. I certainly hope the limit is lifted once the game has been on the market for a while.

Requisite whining about copy protection aside, this is a solid title that offers some fun and addictive game play, with lots to discover and plenty to do. It’s ridiculously easy to sit down with the intention of playing for a few minutes, only to look up and see that two or three hours have gone past. There’s a lot of character in the animations, the voice-acting is superb and the setting is fantastic. Dawn of Discovery deserves to be checked out by anybody who has an interest in exploration and the classic city-building titles of old.

Share On: