A small an sophisticated settlement simulator which will provide hours of entertainment
+ Sophisticated
+ Colourful appearence
Negatives
- Lacks some important features
- Steep learning curve
Anno 1701: Dawn of discovery is a settlement simulation, so the aim is to build a settlement from scratch and provide for your population, at the start there's a legnthly tutorial and also a small story mode that you can complete easily within a few hours, and even after this you may not be clear on some small elements of the gameplay. It's not that the tutorial is bad, it just dosen't always explain its self in a way everyone understands.
Your given a birds eye grid view on your empire and you can choose to build what you want, buildings include houses, taverns, pubs, baths, chapels, churches, lumberyards, mines and so many more, each building plays a vital role, and as your society grows you unlock more types of people and more buildings. At the start you only have peasents and acess to basic supplies such as fishing and lumberyards, it's really great watching your society grow and controlling certain aspects of their lifes (such as how much taxes they pay and so on) your peoples happiness contributes to how rich you become and how quickly your empire grows.
One of the main points about the game is that it's sophisticated, it really suits the DS in the way you can pick it up and put it down quickly, it's a true portable simulator that ticks all the boxes, but as always you'll be missing out on a lot of features that just wouldn't work on the DS that other Sim games have, such as advanced combat, the combat includes clicking on your army and sending them into battle, you don't get any say in tactics and it seems the army with the most players always wins and in that way it's much easier to defend that attack.
But, overall if you like Simulators such as Age Of Empires or Civilization you'll probably enjoy Anno 1701, but beware it's probably best played on the go as it's console superiors have a lot more features and ultimately a lot more fun to be had, which isn't much to say considering how fun this one is!