URBAN OUTFITTER

NEED TO KNOW

WHAT IS IT?

Expansive city-builder themed around the industrial revolution

EXPECT TO PAY $60

DEVELOPER Blue Byte

PUBLISHER Ubisoft

REVIEWED ON Nvidia GTX Titan, Intel core i5-3570K 3.40 GHZ, 16 GB RAM

MULTIPLAYER Yes

LINK www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/anno-1800

Anno 1800 belongs to a select group of games that I like to refer to as “blink and it’s 2am” games. For example, you might sit down in an evening with the plan of setting up your first steel mill. Then you blink and it’s 2am and you’ve somehow founded a colony in the New World. Alternatively, perhaps you set the goal of reaching the next population milestone to unlock a new building. Then you do that, and the building you unlock is a zoo for which you can build individual enclosures to fill with several dozen type of animals. Blink.

This is comfortably the most engrossing city-builder I’ve played since , one that combines an intriguing theme with