Anno 1404: Venice (2010)

Venice is an add-on pack featuring 300 new quests, 60 new items and a series of new scenarios based around Venetian culture. There’s also a new island type (Volcano) adding to the trading and tactical possibilities of your old European and Oriental cultures. Visually not a lot has changed – it’s still great to look at, with your hoard of animated townspeople going about their business. There’s also a new sounds and music, making the city building side of things curiously hypnotic when you’ve got bigger issues to take care of.

Perhaps the biggest change with Venice is the addition of Spies to your diplomatic toolkit. Spies are available once you’ve built an Operations Base, but once done they can take care of policing your own city or creating mayhem in an opponent’s. Depending on the level of the building you occupy you can launch arson attacks, sabotage the water supply, spread disease or sow dissent in the marketplace to (eventually) start a revolt. In Oriental bases you can also send out a belly dancer as a distraction or create false prophets to cause more widespread confusion. Naturally, others can do the same to you but this, and the option to buy Council membership in rival cities offers interesting new ways of expanding control without resorting to naval combat. There’s also a decent multiplayer mode which can be played by up to eight people over the internet or local area network in versus or co-op mode. At the time of writing only a handful of people online owned the add-on, making this impossible to test, but it will be interesting to see how the more tranquil pace of Anno survives on competitive online servers.

However there are disappointments. Not only is there no single-player Venice campaign (just 15 new scenarios) but you can’t even replay the old 1404 campaign using your new units and abilities. For such a notable naval power there’s only a disappointing two new trading ships, and keeping track of quests is still as cumbersome as ever, with the all-important Quest log still buried on a sub-menu. So, although Anno: Venice doesn’t quite fix all that was broken, luckily there wasn’t a lot wrong in the first place.

You can download game here:

http://www.wupload.com/file/24299220/gbackup_andaofdi_ven_1gb.rar

Password: Silent.Hunter