Anno 117: Pax Romana's Hidden Gem Turns Out to Be a Stunning First-Person View.
Hold on — were you aware you can play the game Anno 117 from a first-person viewpoint? If you're thinking that, you feel equally astonished as my own reaction the moment I learned this concealed mode. Allow me to step away from managing my empire, leave it in a trusted assistant, take a wagon, and enjoy a ride around the classical city.
Activating the First-Person Mode
As a city-building game, Anno 117 Pax Romana usually operates from a bird's-eye view. However, if you enter a secret combination — for example “Ctrl,” “Shift,” and “R” on keyboard or “Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B/Circle, A/X” on a controller — you can explore the realm as a regular inhabitant. Given a comparable hidden feature was included in Anno 1800, I was eager to experience it in the new release, yet I had doubts it would work prior to being stuck in a Celtic building (possibly an unexpected bug — this option tends to be somewhat unstable occasionally).
Discovering the Ancient Streets
Once I crawled out, I walked the bustling streets across my settlement and visited stalls, alehouses, blossom gardens, and shellfish gatherers — it was glorious to observe my diligent efforts from a brand-new perspective. I detected a variety of intricacies I might have missed when viewing from overhead: Entryway ornaments, a donkey carrying a flower bucket, poultry scattering about, folks chilling on their balconies… Even just observing the shape of a window sill and the paint layers on a column becomes engaging for those not residing in classical times.
More Than Just Walking
However, there's additional content to the game's immersive perspective than strolling along the road. I became extraordinarily excited the moment I learned that I could not just look upon farming fields, but also enter them. And although I’d assumed structures would be inaccessible, I was able to enter clay pits, tour an esteemed educational structure as teaching was underway, and intrude into private gardens. Don’t try to open any doors (not even the studio allocated resources for that), however, you can definitely stroll around a barley farm, observe people digging and transporting bags, and look within any modest shelter as long as the door is absent.
Graphics and Ambiance
Even though I expected to witness my city rendered with outdated visual quality, excluding a few unpolished motions and periodic inhabitants sitting in a bench as opposed to atop a bench, the first-person view appears much better than expected. The highly detailed textures (especially stone surfaces) really have no business being this good in what is still, essentially, a top-down game. You won't necessarily notice specific hair details, however, you can observe writings on surfaces, sparks flying from torches, fading on bricks, eye details, and pine tree leaves. The night, featuring dancing flames and stars shining in the distance, is especially atmospheric, and also a lot less scary versus the earlier title, given that the populace appears unlike nightmarish entities now.
Discovery and Modification
Since Anno 117’s super-secret first-person mode doesn’t come with an instruction manual, I chose to test various actions, and promptly found the options to jump, sprint, and zoom in or out — with the latter allowing me to alternate between immersive and external perspectives and return. I subsequently tried pressing various digit inputs and discovered that I could change my representative's visual design. Golden robe? Red toga? Sapphire and amethyst dress? Or — perhaps even better — full armor? You may carry a sword and shield, or, my favorite, don a marksman outfit; if you hit the interaction button, you’ll fire burning arrows into the sky. If you're interested, it’s not possible to kill civilians (not that I attempted, naturally).
Humor and Citizen Interactions
However, I had no desire to injure my people, because they’re way too funny. Moments after I entered first-person mode, I heard a parent advising their offspring that he “Can’t have a pet fox and if you offer additional fowl, your grandmother will be furious.” Appropriate response, paternal figure. One lovely local Celt then started applauding my outstanding integration methods by labeling it “Perfect fusion,” meanwhile a grumpy senior female opted to menace me: “Repeat that statement, and your disappearance will be permanent.”
The Joy of Joyriding
Just as I assumed I’d discovered all there is to discover in the title's first-person feature, I encountered the delight of riding across historical settings. Totally unintentionally, I clicked on a wagon and was promptly seated on the box. Cattle, asses, even people-powered transports; you can drive them all at your leisure. The donkey-powered transport, notably, travels rather rapidly, but don't anticipate any GTA-like shenanigans — you can’t drive into people or other wagons (again, not saying I’ve tried).
Combat Limitations
The sole aspect that let me down in Anno 117’s first-person mode was finding out I couldn’t partake in battle encounters. Sporting my soldier fit, I charged toward adversaries amidst fighting and attempted to attack them, but was entirely disregarded. The close-up view was nonetheless magnificent, and watching the enemy run, their appendages thrashing around, seemed enormously rewarding, but it would’ve been cool to effectively strike targets using my fiery projectiles.