By Enzo Zalamea

Copyright primagames

Anno 117: Pax Romana’s demo released on Steam on September 2 and is set to end on September 16. It has its own separate Steam demo page, giving it a completely unrelated review score to the original.

At the time of writing, the demo is getting mixed reviews, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it is a bad game. In fact, this situation is quite unique.

Why is Anno 117 Pax Romana Getting Mixed Steam Reviews?

If you look at Anno 117’s Pax Romana Steam demo page, you’ll see a mixed review score, which is typically considered quite low. However, most of the negative reviews that contribute to that mixed score are mostly talking about Ubisoft’s technical issues more than anything else.

Like most PC gamers out there, Steam has been the saving grace for consumers. They really take care of the consumer, which is why a lot of people want their games on Steam. However, that creates another problem for developers. Yup, everyone just wants to launch everything on Steam.

Since Ubisoft has its platform, it would want people to use it for their games. There isn’t really an incentive in doing that, but people are fed up with being “forced” to go through Ubisoft’s UPlay when launching a Ubisoft game on Steam.

They’ll have to go through their security measures, account recoveries, and all sorts of problems. It isn’t entirely their fault, since it is quite normal to forget an account you rarely use. But having all these issues can be a terrible experience for anyone who was willing to try Ubisoft’s Anno 117 Pax Romana demo. It wasn’t worth it for them, so they gave up but left a negative review.

While it may be generalizing things, from my experience in playing Anno 1800 (the previous title in the franchise), most of the bad reviews always talk about Ubisoft Connect. After playing Anno 1800 for hundreds of hours, it was definitely a city-building masterpiece worth the trouble. Is it worth it for Anno 117: Pax Romana?

Anno 117 Pax Romana Demo First Impressions

As a disclosure, Anno 117: Pax Romana has a 1-hour limit for playtime. You can bypass it by creating another playthrough, but you’ll barely experience anything with a 1-hour playthrough since you start over.

Compared to its predecessor, its UI definitely had a slight “downgrade.” Things, icons, or commands aren’t as intuitive, but it could change in the future, especially when other features that weren’t available in the demo start showing up.

Second, gameplay mechanics are too similar to Anno 1800, but I see this as a good thing. Why change something that isn’t broken? The essence of starting your faction or civilization felt very engaging without overly complicating things quickly.

The game guides you through the basics of creating a settlement, meeting their needs, growing the population, expanding the faction, and more. Even doing the simplest tasks, a newcomer will already get a glimpse of unique challenges like maximizing space efficiency, financial gains, and setting blueprints.

However, the demo could be frustrating for newcomers due to the 1-hour time limit. If it is going to be your first Anno game, you’ll spend a lot of time reading during that 1-hour time frame. For veterans, that 1-hour time frame also limits what you can experience, like supply chains, trade routes, diplomacies, and more.

So far, Anno 117: Pax Romana’s demo is still a net positive, but it definitely didn’t meet expectations even through the demo.