Anno 1800: Console Edition

Anno 1800: Console Edition brings the sprawling city-building strategy originally released on PC to Xbox Series X|S, set in a fictional version of the nineteenth century on the threshold of the industrial revolution. The player founds and expands a network of island settlements, plans production chains from raw materials to complex goods, addresses the needs of inhabitants from various social classes, and simultaneously engages in diplomacy, trade, and military clashes with neighbors. The depth of the economic systems, where each new tier of inhabitants requires new types of production and raw materials, ranks among the most complex things to appear in the city-builder genre on consoles, and the game also offers expeditions to exotic regions beyond the main map.

The console version arrived with completely reworked gamepad controls - radial menus, contextual hints, and smart switching between map layers are meant to replace mouse precision, which succeeded surprisingly well given the amount of information the game displays on screen at once. On Series X the game benefits from fast loading and stable framerates even in sprawling cities with thousands of buildings and dense transport networks between islands.

Contemporary reviews praised above all the fact that such a complex strategy game was successfully adapted to a controller without a fundamental loss of functionality, even though some advanced operations like mass-reconnecting production chains remain faster on PC. For console players, this is one of few opportunities to try a truly deep economic city-builder without needing a keyboard and mouse, and Anno 1800 thus expanded the franchise's audience with a new generation of players who never tried the PC version. The large amount of additional content the game gained on PC over the years through expansions was also carried over into the console edition, so players get a practically complete experience including later story chapters and new biomes.

Why play it: For console players wanting to try a deep economic city-builder without a keyboard and mouse, who also get all the later add-on content included.