Your people need sustenance and so you create a farm for meat and vegetables and deploy sea-fisherman to gather fish. With this wood you can then build houses and in these houses increase your population. Your first task here is to create resources for a settlement by building a lumberyard to chop down trees. He speaks slowly in a small speech bubble, an irritation in a game where speedy access to information is of paramount importance. Your adviser comments on your actions and gives advice. Newcomers are advised to start with the excellent campaign mode that skilfully imparts first the basics and then the complexities of this ocean deep management experience.
ANNO 1701 DAWN DISCOVERY MANUALS PC
The game, an original off-shoot from the popular PC series of strategy sims is split into three modes: a campaign comprised of 15 over-arching mission, a versatile endless sand-box mode and multiplayer for up to four players. Videogame metaphors for the birth of contemporary world superpowers don't get much sharper than this. Subtly but forcefully you become a capitalist tyrant, hungry for more power and further dominion, obsessed with defending and promoting that which you've worked hard to create. Intentional or not, it's brilliant, enlightening role-play as you steadily grow addicted to expanding your colony into other archipelago islands before building up a military to fend off rivals and subjugate those natives who oppose you. The bright presentation, friendly pilgrim-esque character portraits and well-to-do dialogue promote an atmosphere so innocent and orderly that you barely notice the shaky ethical ground upon which you build. These are lands to settle and histories to write, a feeling which presumably mirrors that of those historical European pioneers for whom survival and the establishment of community was of greater importance than appeasement or integration with the natives. The game drives you through its excellent and seamless tutorials, and you develop vigour and purpose. Although it never explicitly says so, this is a game about dark imperialist history in which you mastermind a defiant invasion by stealing land from the indigenous people groups who already call it home. As you disembark your galleon onto a sunny, yellow shore and set about levelling the land, building houses, churches, pubs, quarries and profits your conscience remains unpricked by the comfortable plod of capitalism.īut, when the first Red Indian chief enters your growing settlement and requests politely that you get the hell out of his country the mask slips. It's difficult to put a finger on at first. Unlike, say, The Darkness or Manhunt or Silent Hill which promote and delight in their distastefulness, this Sim City-like DS game hides its dark under a well-lit bushel. There's something mildly unsettling about Anno 1701's premise.
0 kommentar(er)
