Anno 117's Pax Romana's Best-Kept Secret Reveals Itself as a Stunning First-Person Perspective.
Surprisingly — did you realize gamers have the option to enjoy the game Anno 117 from a first-person viewpoint? Should that be your response, your surprise matches compared to my initial response the moment I learned this concealed mode. Allow me to step away from overseeing my civilization, entrust it to a capable deputy, commandere a carriage, and go for a joyride across the Roman world.
Activating the First-Person View
Being a city-building title, the game Anno 117 is typically played from an overhead perspective. Yet, when you enter a secret combination — such as “Ctrl,” “Shift,” and “R” using PC controls or “Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B/Circle, A/X” on a controller — you gain the ability to walk your domain as a common citizen. Since a similar easter egg was part of the previous Anno title, I looked forward to experience it in the latest installment, but I wasn’t sure it would work until I found myself stuck in a Celtic building (possibly an unexpected bug — this mode is a little buggy at times).
Discovering the Streets of Rome
Once I crawled out, I wandered the lively avenues across my settlement and explored stalls, alehouses, floral patches, and cockle pickers — it felt magnificent to witness the fruits of my labor using an entirely new viewpoint. I noticed all kinds of details I might have missed from the top-down view: Front door decorations, a beast of burden holding a blossom container, poultry scattering about, folks chilling on their balconies… Merely examining the shape of a window sill and the paint layers on a column is quite interesting to someone who doesn’t live in Ancient Rome.
Further Than Mere Wandering
Yet, the experience extends to the first-person feature in Anno 117 aside from meandering through streets. I became extraordinarily excited upon discovering that I could not just view crop lands, but also step into them. And even though I thought interiors would be restricted, I was able to enter mud extraction sites, tour an esteemed educational structure as teaching was underway, and even trespass into people’s gardens. Don’t try to open any doors (not even the creators allocated resources for that), but it’s entirely possible stroll around a barley farm, watch folks shoveling and carrying sacks, and glance into any tiny hut provided the entrance is missing.
Appearance and Mood
While I was completely ready to observe my settlement depicted with outdated visual quality, apart from certain rough movements and the occasional civilian resting within a bench instead of on a bench, first-person mode looks considerably improved over predictions. The intricately designed surfaces (especially stone surfaces) really have no business being this good for a title that remains primarily overhead. You may not see separate follicular elements, but you will see engravings on walls, sparks flying from torches, fading on bricks, eye details, and pine tree leaves. The night, featuring dancing flames and celestial bodies twinkling afar, generates a uniquely immersive environment, and also a lot less scary compared to Anno 1800, given that the populace appears unlike terrifying apparitions anymore.
Testing and Personalization
Given the covert first-person feature has no guided tutorial, I opted to try different commands, and promptly found the abilities to leap, run, and zoom in or out — with the latter allowing me to switch between first and third-person views and back. I then decided to hit certain numeric keys and learned I could modify my character’s appearance. Yellow toga? Ruby clothing? Blue and purple toga? Or — maybe superior — complete battle gear? You might hold a weapon and defense, or, personally chosen, equip a shooter's costume; if you hit the interaction button, you launch incendiary bolts heavenward. If you're interested, eliminating citizens cannot be done (not that I attempted, naturally).
Humor and Citizen Interactions
But I wouldn’t wish to harm my citizens anyway, because they’re way too funny. Only seconds after I landed the first-person view, I heard a parent advising their offspring that he “Can’t have a pet fox and should you provide another poultry, your elder will punish you.” Rightly so, Roman dad. A pleasant regional Celt then proceeded to praise my brilliant Romano-Celtic policies by calling it the “Best of both worlds,” whereas an irritable elderly woman chose to intimidate me: “Say that one more time, and they’ll never find your body.”
The Thrill of Transportation
Just when I thought I’d discovered all there is to discover in the title's first-person feature, I encountered the delight of riding through classical settlements. Totally unintentionally, I clicked on a wagon and quickly occupied the transport. Cattle, asses, even human-pulled carts; you can control each one as desired. The donkey-powered transport, notably, is pretty fast, but don't anticipate open-world vehicular chaos — impacting citizens or additional vehicles cannot occur (once more, not admitting any attempts).
Fighting Restrictions
The sole aspect that let me down within the immersive perspective was discovering my inability to participate in any fighting. Wearing my military outfit, I approached opposing forces amidst fighting and attempted to attack them, yet was completely overlooked. The front-row seat remained quite impressive, and seeing opponents retreat, their arms flailing about, felt highly gratifying, yet it would have been exciting to successfully impact objects via my incendiary bolts.
