Anno 117: Pax Romana Review - A Roman Empire That Crumbles Under Its Own Weight

Welcome back, strategists. Today we're examining Anno 117: Pax Romana, Ubisoft's latest entry in the beloved city-building series that takes us to ancient Rome. After Anno 1800 set an incredibly high bar with its intricate supply chains and deeply satisfying gameplay, expectations were sky-high for this Roman Empire builder. Unfortunately, Anno 117 stumbles badly, delivering a frustratingly unbalanced experience that feels more like a step backward than forward. Let's break it down using our comprehensive 10-point rating system.

What is Anno 117: Pax Romana?

Anno 117: Pax Romana is a city-building and economic simulation game set during the height of the Roman Empire. You play as a governor tasked with expanding Roman territory across the Mediterranean, managing complex production chains, fulfilling population needs, and building sprawling cities filled with temples, forums, and aqueducts.

The Anno series has always been about balancing intricate economic systems while creating beautiful, functional cities. Anno 117 attempts to apply this formula to ancient Rome, complete with gladiatorial arenas, religious temples to multiple gods, and Roman military conquest. On paper, it sounds perfect. In execution, it's a mess of broken balance and frustrating mechanics.

The PUG Empire 10-Point Rating System

Before we dive into the details, here's how we evaluate every game:

Graphics & Visuals (1.0 point) - Does it look good?
Audio & Soundtrack (1.0 point) - How's the audio experience?
Story & Narrative (1.0 point) - Is there a compelling story?
Gameplay & Mechanics (1.0 point) - How does it feel to play?
Level Design & Environments (1.0 point) - Are the maps well-designed?
Difficulty & Balance (1.0 point) - Is it fair and well-tuned?
Replayability (1.0 point) - Will you keep coming back?
Performance & Optimization (1.0 point) - Does it run well?
Innovation & Originality (1.0 point) - Does it bring something new?
Multiplayer (1.0 point) - How's the online experience?

Final Score: 6.2/10

At its best moments, Anno 117 captures the grandeur of ancient Rome with impressive visuals and atmospheric sound design. But these moments are fleeting, quickly overshadowed by a broken economy system and core mechanics that fail to deliver the strategic satisfaction the series is known for. This is a game that wants to be epic but ends up feeling tedious.

Now let's break down exactly where Anno 117 succeeds and, more importantly, where it falls short.

Graphics & Visuals: 0.75 / 1.00

Anno 117's presentation is one of its few bright spots. The game recreates ancient Rome with impressive attention to architectural detail. Your cities grow from humble settlements of wooden huts into sprawling metropolises filled with marble temples, grand aqueducts, and imposing forums. The transition from dirt paths to Roman roads paved with stone feels rewarding, and watching citizens in togas go about their daily routines adds life to your empire.

The Mediterranean setting allows for gorgeous coastal vistas. Sunlight glitters off the sea, olive groves sway in the breeze, and distant mountains frame your settlements beautifully. The game's lighting system deserves special praise - dawn and dusk cast warm golden light across your cities, while storms darken the sky dramatically.

However, the visuals aren't without issues. The UI feels cluttered and less intuitive than Anno 1800's clean interface. Important information often gets buried in nested menus, forcing you to click through multiple screens to find basic production data. The color palette, while historically appropriate, can make different resources hard to distinguish at a glance. After hours of play, the brown and beige tones start to blend together.

Zoom in close and you'll notice some texture work lacks the crisp detail of Anno 1800. Buildings can look flat and repetitive, especially in the early game when you're spamming the same structures. The citizen models also lack variety - you'll see the same character models walking the same animation loops far too often.

Still, when the camera pulls back to show your entire empire, Anno 117 can be genuinely breathtaking. It's just a shame the gameplay doesn't match the visual ambition.

Audio & Soundtrack: 0.70 / 1.00

The audio design captures the essence of ancient Rome competently, if not spectacularly. The soundtrack features orchestral pieces with lots of strings and brass that evoke epic historical dramas. Tracks incorporate period-appropriate instruments like lyres and flutes, creating an authentic Mediterranean atmosphere. The music swells nicely during moments of expansion and victory.

Sound effects sell the city-building fantasy well enough. Hammers clang on anvils, market vendors shout, and seagulls cry over coastal settlements. The ambient soundscape changes appropriately as your city grows - a small village sounds quiet and peaceful, while a major city bustles with overlapping conversations and activity.

Where the audio falls flat is in variety and memorability. After 20+ hours with the game, I struggle to hum a single track from memory. The music blends into generic "ancient Rome" background noise rather than creating distinctive themes. Compare this to Anno 1800's memorable industrial-era waltzes and sea shanties that stuck with you long after logging off.

The voice acting for advisors and random events ranges from acceptable to awkward. Some performances feel stiff and lifeless, delivering important information with all the enthusiasm of reading a grocery list. The writing doesn't help - many voice lines are cliché historical dialogue that no actual Roman would have spoken.

Sound effects also lack impact. Building a massive temple should feel momentous, but the audio doesn't sell the scale. Completing major construction projects gets the same generic "construction complete" chime as building a simple farm. These missed opportunities to create audio feedback for player accomplishments make the experience feel flat.

The audio does its job of creating atmosphere, but it rarely elevates the experience beyond functional.

Story & Narrative: 0.45 / 1.00

Anno games have never been story-driven experiences, and Anno 117 continues that tradition - for better and worse. The campaign mode presents a loose narrative about building your influence across the Mediterranean during the height of the Roman Empire, but it's paper-thin and forgettable.

You play as an unnamed governor tasked with expanding Roman territory and managing relationships with neighboring regions. The "story" consists mainly of advisors delivering exposition through text boxes and voice-overs. These advisors represent different aspects of Roman society - military, economy, religion, culture - and frequently contradict each other's advice, which could be interesting if the writing had any depth.

Instead, the narrative feels like an afterthought. Characters lack personality and development. Events happen without proper setup or payoff. You'll complete major milestones that should feel significant - conquering new territories, establishing trade routes, appeasing the gods - but they land with a dull thud because there's no emotional investment.

The historical setting had so much potential for engaging storytelling. Roman history is filled with fascinating political intrigue, military campaigns, cultural clashes, and larger-than-life personalities. Anno 117 largely ignores all of this in favor of generic "build X amount of Y resource" objectives. There are no memorable characters, no meaningful choices, no sense of actually living through a pivotal moment in history.

Random events pop up occasionally - a neighboring region requests aid, a drought threatens crops, citizens demand more entertainment - but these feel disconnected and arbitrary rather than part of a cohesive narrative. They're just another checkbox to manage rather than story moments that create tension or drama.

Sandbox mode fares better simply because it drops the pretense of storytelling entirely. You're free to build your Roman empire however you want without tedious advisor chatter interrupting every five minutes. For many players, this will be the preferred way to experience the game.

The bare-bones narrative does nothing to enhance the city-building gameplay and often detracts from it with poorly written interruptions.

Gameplay & Mechanics: 0.55 / 1.00

Here's where Anno 117 truly disappoints. The core gameplay loop that makes Anno games addictive - balancing complex production chains, managing population needs, expanding strategically - is present but deeply flawed.

The fundamental structure remains familiar: you build production buildings to create resources, fulfill population needs to unlock higher tiers of citizens, and expand your territory to access new resources. On paper, this should work. In practice, the execution is frustratingly rough.

Production Chains: Previous Anno games featured satisfying, logical production chains. You could trace resources from raw materials to finished goods in ways that made intuitive sense. Anno 117's chains feel needlessly convoluted and poorly balanced. Simple items require bizarre combinations of resources. You'll find yourself building massive networks of farms and workshops just to produce basic goods, while other resources flow in faster than you can use them. There's no satisfying rhythm - just constant firefighting of shortages and surpluses.

Population Management: Citizens advance through tiers as you meet their needs, unlocking new buildings and mechanics. This progression should feel rewarding but instead feels like a grind. The jump between tiers demands massive resource investments that don't feel proportional to the benefits gained. You'll spend hours setting up infrastructure for higher-tier citizens only to find their special buildings underwhelming.

Building Placement: The grid-based building system works fine for basic structures but becomes aggravating when placing larger buildings or trying to optimize layouts. Roads and aqueducts don't snap together intuitively. Hills and terrain features that should add strategic depth just make placement frustrating. You'll constantly bulldoze and rebuild sections of your city because the game doesn't communicate building requirements clearly.

Trade System: Trading with other regions should be a major gameplay pillar, but it feels half-baked. Trade routes are tedious to set up and manage. The UI doesn't clearly show what regions produce or need, forcing you to click through multiple menus to gather basic information. Ships move slowly and can only carry limited cargo, making large-scale trade a micromanagement nightmare.

Diplomatic Relations: You can form alliances, trade agreements, or go to war with AI factions. But these systems lack depth. Diplomacy comes down to simple binary choices with predictable outcomes. War is just a matter of producing enough military units to overwhelm opponents - no tactics, no interesting decisions, just raw numbers.

The individual systems aren't terrible in isolation, but they don't mesh together into a cohesive, satisfying whole. Instead of creating elegant strategic puzzles, they create frustrating busywork.

Level Design & Environments: 0.65 / 1.00

The Mediterranean world of Anno 117 provides diverse environments to build in, from fertile coastal plains to rugged mountain terrain. Each region has distinct characteristics that theoretically should encourage different building strategies. Coastal areas offer fishing and trade access but limited farmland. Inland regions provide abundant agriculture but lack naval advantages.

The map variety is decent. You'll encounter different climate zones, from the Italian peninsula to North African deserts to Greek islands. Each area feels visually distinct and presents unique challenges for expansion. Island chains force you to manage multiple settlements and sea routes. Dense forests require clearing before construction. Desert regions struggle with water supply.

However, the level design doesn't fully capitalize on this environmental variety. Different biomes change aesthetics but rarely demand meaningfully different approaches to city-building. You end up following the same basic template everywhere: build farms, extract resources, fulfill population needs, expand. The terrain might change, but your strategy doesn't.

Verticality and terrain features add some strategic considerations. Building on hills provides defensive advantages but limits placement options. Valleys offer protection but can bottleneck expansion. Rivers provide water and trade routes but segment your territory. These elements work okay but feel underdeveloped compared to what they could be.

The maps also suffer from sameness after extended play. Once you've seen the different biome types, new maps don't offer much novelty. There aren't enough unique landmarks or special locations to make exploration exciting. Finding a "rare" resource deposit doesn't feel special when it functions identically to common ones, just with different numbers.

The Mediterranean setting is beautiful and historically evocative, but the level design doesn't leverage it for compelling strategic gameplay.

Difficulty & Balance: 0.35 / 1.00

This is Anno 117's most glaring failure. The game's balance is fundamentally broken, creating a deeply frustrating experience that saps the fun from city-building.

Economy Nightmare: The resource economy is an absolute mess. Production ratios make no sense. You'll build three farms to supply one workshop, but then discover that workshop produces far more than you need, creating waste. Meanwhile, another resource requires a sprawling network of 20+ buildings just to meet basic demand. There's no consistency or logic to the numbers.

Resource consumption fluctuates wildly and unpredictably. Your population might happily consume 10 units of wine for hours, then suddenly demand 50 units with no clear trigger. Production buildings inexplicably stop working or slow down without clear feedback about why. You'll think you've stabilized your economy, leave the game running for ten minutes, and return to find half your city rioting over shortages of resources you had in surplus.

Difficulty Spikes: The campaign's difficulty curve is all over the place. Early missions hold your hand with excessive tutorials, then suddenly mission five throws you into deep water with complex, interconnected systems and no guidance. You'll cruise through some missions in an hour, then get stuck on the next one for three hours because the objectives make no sense.

AI Balance: AI opponents either pose no threat whatsoever or become insurmountable obstacles with no middle ground. On lower difficulties, they're passive and boring. Bump up the difficulty and they suddenly get massive economic cheats, producing resources at impossible rates while you struggle to maintain basic supply chains. This doesn't create compelling challenge - it just feels unfair.

Progression Pacing: The tech tree and building unlocks are poorly paced. Critical buildings unlock too late, forcing you to limp along with inefficient setups for hours. Meanwhile, some powerful buildings unlock early, trivializing certain challenges. The progression doesn't feel like a carefully crafted journey - it feels random.

Feedback Systems: The game does a terrible job communicating what's wrong when things go sideways. Resources shortage icons appear with no explanation of why production stopped. Citizens riot without clear indication of which need isn't being met. You'll spend frustrating minutes clicking through menus trying to diagnose problems that should be immediately obvious.

The broken economy and terrible balance fundamentally undermine everything else. Even when the game does something right, the frustration of fighting against poorly tuned systems drags the experience down. This single issue makes Anno 117 hard to recommend to anyone who values their time and sanity.

Replayability: 0.60 / 1.00

Anno 117 offers the standard city-building replayability factors: sandbox mode, different map seeds, various difficulty settings, and campaign missions. On paper, there's content here to justify multiple playthroughs.

Sandbox mode provides the most freedom. You can build your Roman empire without campaign objectives or narrative interruptions. Different starting conditions and map types theoretically create variety. You might start on a small island chain, forcing naval expansion, or begin in a massive continental region with abundant resources.

The problem is that the fundamental gameplay issues persist across all modes. Whether you're playing campaign or sandbox, you're fighting the same broken economy and frustrating mechanics. Replayability only matters if the core experience is enjoyable, and Anno 117's isn't.

Different difficulty levels don't create meaningful variety - they just adjust how much the AI cheats or how fast resources deplete. There aren't different strategic approaches that emerge at different difficulties. You're just doing the same things with different arbitrary numbers.

The tech tree is mostly linear, offering few meaningful choices about how to develop your empire. Every playthrough follows a similar path: unlock tier 2 citizens, get access to better buildings, unlock tier 3, repeat. There aren't distinct playstyles or build strategies to experiment with.

Modding support could potentially save the replayability factor if the community creates fixes for the balance issues and adds new content. But relying on mods to make your game fun is not a point in Anno 117's favor.

Compared to Anno 1800, which I happily sunk 100+ hours into across multiple campaigns and sandbox runs, I struggle to imagine returning to Anno 117 after completing the campaign once. There's just not enough here that works well enough to justify the time investment.

Performance & Optimization: 0.70 / 1.00

Anno 117 runs acceptably on modern hardware but has notable performance issues that detract from the experience.

Frame Rate: On my mid-to-high-end system (RTX 3070, Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB RAM), the game maintains 60+ FPS in early settlements but chugs noticeably once cities grow large. Zooming out to view an entire developed region can drop frames into the 40s. Given that Anno 1800 handled similarly sized cities more smoothly, this feels like a step backward in optimization.

Loading Times: Initial loads are reasonable at 30-45 seconds on an SSD, but loading saves can take upward of a minute for established games with multiple settlements. Quick save/load during gameplay causes noticeable hitches.

Memory Usage: The game is a memory hog, easily consuming 12+ GB of RAM during extended sessions. I experienced one hard crash after 4+ hours of continuous play, likely due to a memory leak. Auto-save helped prevent major progress loss, but crashes shouldn't happen at all.

UI Responsiveness: The interface occasionally lags, especially when opening complex menus or switching between settlements. Clicking buttons sometimes requires multiple attempts to register. This might seem minor, but in a game where you're constantly clicking through menus, these small delays compound into significant frustration.

Bugs: While not game-breaking, Anno 117 has more bugs than a polished release should. Citizens occasionally get stuck in pathfinding loops. Buildings sometimes don't register as connected to roads even when they clearly are, requiring demolition and rebuilding. Trade ships will occasionally just stop mid-route for no apparent reason. None of these bugs broke my campaign, but they're annoying.

Settings and Options: Graphics settings offer decent customization, allowing you to scale performance based on your hardware. The game includes quality presets that work reasonably well. However, even on lower settings, performance in late-game cities doesn't scale as much as you'd hope.

The performance isn't terrible - the game is playable and rarely crashes. But it's noticeably less polished than Anno 1800, which ran smoother and felt more stable. For a 2025 release from a major publisher, this level of optimization feels below expectations.

Innovation & Originality: 0.45 / 1.00

Innovation was never going to be Anno 117's strong suit - this is the twelfth entry in a long-running series with established gameplay conventions. The question is whether it brings anything new or interesting to the formula. The answer is: barely.

Setting: Moving the series to ancient Rome is the most significant change, and it's purely cosmetic. You're building Roman structures instead of Victorian factories, but the underlying gameplay is almost identical to previous Anno games. The historical setting doesn't introduce new mechanics or systems that meaningfully differentiate the experience. It's a reskin more than a reinvention.

New Features: Anno 117 adds a few new systems. Religion plays a larger role, with multiple gods to appease through temple construction and offerings. This sounds interesting but boils down to simple resource management - sacrifice X goods to god Y for minor bonuses. There's no depth or meaningful choice.

The gladiatorial arena system lets you host games to please citizens and gain influence. In practice, it's another resource sink with minimal strategic impact. You build the arena, assign gladiators, spend resources, get rewards. It's shallow and repetitive.

Military conquest receives slightly more focus than in Anno 1800, with the ability to capture and hold territory through force. But the combat is simplistic and boring - just produce more units than your opponent and right-click their city. Total War this is not.

Regression: Alarmingly, Anno 117 actually removes or simplifies features from Anno 1800. The newspaper system that provided flavor and player feedback is gone. The tourist mechanics are absent. The multi-session gameplay where you managed both Old World and New World territories simultaneously is replaced with a less interesting single-map approach.

Quality of Life: Even small improvements are missing. Anno 1800 had excellent UI shortcuts, blueprint mode for easy city planning, and quality-of-life features developed over years of updates. Anno 117 feels like it ignored those lessons and started from an earlier version of the Anno formula.

The game brings almost nothing new to the city-building genre or even to its own series. It's an Anno game in ancient Rome rather than a fresh take on the formula. Given that it's also less polished and balanced than its predecessor, the lack of innovation is especially damaging.

Multiplayer: 0.40 / 1.00

Anno 117 includes cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes, allowing you to build alongside or against other players. On paper, this sounds like it could extend the game's value. In execution, it's plagued by the same issues as single-player, plus additional problems specific to multiplayer.

Co-op: Playing cooperatively means building your empires on the same map, potentially trading resources and supporting each other. This can be fun with a patient friend, but the broken economy balance makes coordination frustrating. When single-player already requires constant attention to prevent collapse, adding another player's needs to juggle amplifies the chaos.

Trading between players is theoretically a cool feature but the clunky trade system makes it more annoying than helpful. Setting up routes between players requires both parties to micromanage settings, and the lack of clear UI feedback means you'll spend more time in menus than building.

Competitive: Versus mode lets you compete for territory, resources, and dominance. The fundamental problem is that Anno's slow, methodical city-building doesn't translate well to competitive play. Matches take hours, and the simplistic combat means whoever establishes economic superiority first will win - there's no comeback potential or dramatic reversals.

The AI bonuses on higher difficulties that feel unfair in single-player are even worse when applied to human opponents. Players who pull ahead quickly become unstoppable. There's no meaningful catchup mechanics or balancing to keep matches competitive.

Technical Issues: Multiplayer has notable performance and stability problems. Desyncs occur frequently, forcing players to reload. Lag is common, even with good internet connections. The game occasionally crashes during longer sessions, and if the host disconnects, everyone loses progress.

Community: The multiplayer community for Anno games has always been small, and Anno 117's poor reception means finding matches is difficult. You'll likely need to organize games with friends rather than relying on random matchmaking.

Multiplayer feels like an afterthought. The systems aren't designed for competitive or cooperative play - they're single-player mechanics awkwardly adapted for multiple people. Unless you have dedicated friends willing to overlook the game's many flaws, you'll get more enjoyment from single-player sandbox mode.

Final Verdict: 6.2 / 10.00

Anno 117: Pax Romana is a disappointing entry in a beloved series. It had the foundation to be great - a fascinating historical setting, proven gameplay formula, and the backing of a major publisher. Instead, it's a frustrating, poorly balanced mess that takes steps backward from its predecessor.

The core problem is simple: the game isn't fun. City-building should be satisfying - watching your settlement grow, solving logistical puzzles, creating efficient production chains. Anno 117 turns these pleasures into tedious frustration through broken economy balance and poorly designed mechanics. You're not cleverly managing an empire; you're fighting against systems that don't work properly.

What works: The game looks nice, especially from a distance. The Roman setting has visual appeal. The audio creates appropriate atmosphere. The basic city-building structure inherited from better Anno games occasionally shines through. In rare moments where everything aligns - your economy briefly stabilizes, a new tier unlocks, your city sprawls impressively across the landscape - you can glimpse what Anno 117 could have been.

What doesn't work: Almost everything else. The economy balance is horrendous, forcing you to constantly battle inexplicable shortages and surpluses. Core mechanics feel half-baked and poorly tested. The difficulty curve is erratic. The game provides terrible feedback about problems. Quality-of-life features from Anno 1800 are missing. The "new" features are shallow and uninteresting. Performance is worse despite being a newer game.

Who might enjoy this: If you're desperate for more Anno-style gameplay and can tolerate massive frustration, there's technically content here. Patient players willing to research optimal builds online and accept the broken systems might squeeze some enjoyment out of sandbox mode. Hardcore city-building fans who must play every entry in the genre could find value, though they'll be disappointed.

Who should avoid this: Anyone who valued Anno 1800's elegant balance and polish should stay away. If you have limited gaming time and want a satisfying city-building experience, dozens of better options exist. If you're new to the Anno series, this is absolutely not where you should start - go play Anno 1800 instead.

The bottom line: Anno 117: Pax Romana is a significant step backward for the series. Ubisoft took a winning formula and made it worse through poor balancing, questionable design choices, and apparent lack of playtesting. The Roman setting can't compensate for fundamentally flawed gameplay.

At $60, this is impossible to recommend. Wait for deep sales if you must experience it, or better yet, skip it entirely and replay Anno 1800. Your time and money deserve better than fighting against a broken economy for dozens of frustrating hours.

Score Breakdown:

Graphics & Visuals: 0.75 / 1.00
Audio & Soundtrack: 0.70 / 1.00
Story & Narrative: 0.45 / 1.00
Gameplay & Mechanics: 0.55 / 1.00
Level Design & Environments: 0.65 / 1.00
Difficulty & Balance: 0.35 / 1.00
Replayability: 0.60 / 1.00
Performance & Optimization: 0.70 / 1.00
Innovation & Originality: 0.45 / 1.00
Multiplayer: 0.40 / 1.00

Final Score: 6.2 / 10.00

Rome wasn't built in a day, but it shouldn't crumble under the weight of poor game design either. Anno 117: Pax Romana needed more time in development to fix its fundamental issues. As released, it's a frustrating experience that fails to capture what makes the Anno series special.

Have you played Anno 117: Pax Romana? Share your experiences in the comments! For more strategy game reviews and guides, check out the rest of PUG Empire's content!