Anno 117 Pax Romana's Best-Kept Secret Turns Out to Be a Impressive First-Person Mode.
Surprisingly — did you realize gamers have the option to enjoy Anno 117 Pax Romana from a first-person viewpoint? Should that be your response, you feel equally astonished as my own reaction when I discovered this secret option. I must temporarily abandon overseeing my civilization, leave it in a trusted assistant, take a wagon, and take a spin across the Roman world.
How to Access the First-Person Feature
As a city-building game, Anno 117: Pax Romana is typically played from an overhead perspective. Yet, when you press a covert button sequence — including “Ctrl,” “Shift,” and “R” on keyboard or else “Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B/Circle, A/X” on console — it becomes possible to roam the empire as an ordinary Roman. Given a comparable hidden feature appeared in Anno 1800, I was eager to try it out in the new release, though I was uncertain it would operate prior to being chin-deep in a Celtic floorboard (which probably wasn’t intended — this option is prone to glitches now and then).
Discovering the Roman Cityscape
Upon freeing myself, I walked the bustling streets of my city and toured markets, breweries, floral patches, and shellfish gatherers — the experience was splendid to observe all my hard work from a brand-new perspective. I detected all kinds of details I might have missed from the top-down view: Entryway ornaments, a donkey carrying a flower bucket, chickens running loose, folks chilling on their balconies… Merely examining the form of a ledge and the paint layers on a column proves fascinating for those not residing in classical times.
Further Than Mere Wandering
Yet, the experience extends to the game's immersive perspective aside from meandering through streets. I was especially delighted upon discovering that besides being able to look upon agricultural plots, but also access them. And despite my expectation the building models would be off-limits, I could walk onto mud extraction sites, tour an esteemed educational structure during active classes, and invade personal courtyards. Don't bother with door access (not even the studio planned for that functionality), yet it's completely feasible meander across a cereal plantation, see citizens working with tools and burdens, and look within any modest shelter when there's no doorway obstructing.
Visual Quality and Atmosphere
Even though I expected to see my metropolis represented using primitive rendering, apart from certain rough movements and the occasional civilian resting in a bench as opposed to atop a bench, the immersive perspective seems far superior to anticipations. The highly detailed textures (especially stone surfaces) really have no business being this good in what is still, essentially, a top-down game. You may not see any individual strands of hair, however, you can observe wall inscriptions, flames emitting from lights, brick decoloration, eye details, and evergreen foliage. The night, featuring dancing flames and distant stellar illumination, creates a particularly moody setting, and feels much less frightening versus the earlier title, given that the populace appears unlike nightmarish entities anymore.
Discovery and Modification
Given the covert first-person feature doesn’t come with an instruction manual, I decided to experiment a bit, and promptly found the abilities to leap, run, and adjusting the view — the zoom function permitting me to switch between first and third-person views and return. I then experimented with various digit inputs and found I could alter my character’s appearance. Amber garment? Red toga? Blue and purple toga? Or — potentially preferable — armored suit? You might hold a weapon and defense, or, my favorite, don a marksman outfit; if you hit the interaction button, you’ll fire burning arrows into the sky. In case you’re wondering, it’s not possible to kill civilians (not that I’ve tried, of course).
Comedy and Population Encounters
But I wouldn’t wish to harm my citizens anyway, as they're remarkably entertaining. Shortly after I activated the first-person view, I listened to a dad instructing his kid that “You cannot keep a fox as a pet and if you offer additional fowl, your gran will have your head.” Rightly so, Roman dad. A pleasant regional Celt then started applauding my brilliant Romano-Celtic policies by calling it the “Best of both worlds,” whereas an irritable elderly woman opted to menace me: “Repeat that statement, and your disappearance will be permanent.”
The Joy of Joyriding
Just when I thought I uncovered all possible content in Anno 117: Pax Romana’s first-person mode, I encountered the delight of riding through classical settlements. Entirely by accident, I selected a carriage and quickly occupied the transport. Bovines, equines, even human-pulled carts; you may operate any of them freely. The ass-drawn vehicle, specifically, moves quite quickly, though you shouldn’t imagine open-world vehicular chaos — colliding with pedestrians or other carts is impossible (once more, not admitting any attempts).
Battle Constraints
The sole aspect that let me down in Anno 117’s first-person mode was finding out I couldn’t partake in combat situations. Sporting my soldier fit, I approached opposing forces amidst fighting and endeavored to damage them, yet was completely overlooked. The front-row seat was still rather spectacular, and observing foes flee, their limbs waving wildly, seemed enormously rewarding, though it might have been amazing to actually hit something via my incendiary bolts.