Anno 117's Pax Romana's Best-Kept Secret Reveals Itself as a Breathtaking First-Person Perspective.
Wait — did you know you can play Anno 117: Pax Romana in first-person? If that’s your reaction, you feel equally astonished as I was when I discovered this concealed mode. Excuse me while briefly leave managing my empire, leave it in a reliable subordinate, commandere a carriage, and enjoy a ride around the classical city.
How to Access the First-Person Mode
As a city-building game, Anno 117 Pax Romana is typically played using a top-down camera. But, should you enter a secret combination — including “Ctrl,” “Shift,” and “R” on a keyboard or “Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B/Circle, A/X” on console — you gain the ability to walk your domain as a common citizen. Since a similar easter egg was part of the earlier game Anno 1800, I felt excited to test it in the latest installment, yet I had doubts it would function prior to being stuck in a Celtic building (possibly an unexpected bug — this feature is somewhat unstable occasionally).
Roaming the Ancient Streets
Once I crawled out, I strolled the busy roads through my metropolis and explored stalls, alehouses, flower fields, and seafood collectors — it was glorious to observe all my hard work through a fresh lens. I observed a variety of intricacies that would escape notice from the top-down view: Doorway embellishments, a donkey carrying a flower bucket, chickens running loose, folks chilling on their balconies… Merely examining the shape of a window sill and the coloration on a post proves fascinating to someone who doesn’t live in Ancient Rome.
Beyond Simple Strolling
Yet, the experience extends to the game's immersive perspective beyond simply walking the paths. I became extraordinarily excited the moment I learned that besides being able to view crop lands, but also access them. And even though I thought structures would be inaccessible, I was able to enter earthen quarries, tour an esteemed educational structure during active classes, and intrude into private gardens. Avoid attempting to open doors (not even the creators allocated resources for that), but it’s entirely possible stroll around a barley farm, observe people digging and transporting bags, and take a peek inside any small shack provided the entrance is missing.
Visual Quality and Atmosphere
While I was completely ready to see my metropolis represented using primitive rendering, besides some crude animations and periodic inhabitants sitting within a bench instead of on a bench, the immersive perspective seems much better than expected. The highly detailed textures (notably masonry elements) really have no business being this good for a title that remains primarily overhead. You might not observe separate follicular elements, but you will see engravings on walls, fiery particles from lamps, brick decoloration, eye details, and conifer needles. Evening, with glowing light sources and celestial bodies twinkling afar, creates a particularly moody setting, and feels much less frightening relative to the previous game, now that the citizens don’t look like nightmarish entities now.
Testing and Personalization
Since Anno 117’s super-secret first-person mode has no guided tutorial, I chose to test various actions, and immediately located the functions for jumping, dashing, and zoom in or out — with the latter allowing me to change from first-person to third-person mode and back. I then decided to hit various digit inputs and found I could alter my representative's visual design. Golden robe? Red toga? Azure and violet outfit? Or — perhaps even better — full armor? You may carry a sword and shield, or, preferably, wear an archer's uniform; when you press the action key, you launch incendiary bolts heavenward. Should you be curious, it’s not possible to kill civilians (not that I attempted, naturally).
Comedy and Population Encounters
But I wouldn’t wish to harm my citizens anyway, since they're incredibly amusing. Moments after I entered the first-person view, I listened to a dad instructing his kid that he “Can’t have a pet fox and if you offer additional fowl, your gran will have your head.” Understandable stance, father character. A friendly native Celtic person then proceeded to praise my excellent cross-cultural strategies by labeling it “Perfect fusion,” whereas an irritable elderly woman chose to intimidate me: “Say that one more time, and they’ll never find your body.”
The Joy of Joyriding
At the moment I believed I’d discovered all there is to discover in the title's first-person feature, I encountered the delight of riding across historical settings. Entirely by accident, I interacted with a cart and quickly occupied the transport. Cattle, asses, even human-pulled carts; you can drive them all at your leisure. The donkey-powered transport, notably, is pretty fast, although you shouldn't expect open-world vehicular chaos — impacting citizens or additional vehicles cannot occur (once more, not admitting any attempts).
Fighting Restrictions
The only thing that disappointed me regarding the first-person view was finding out I couldn’t partake in battle encounters. Sporting my soldier fit, I ran up to the enemy in the midst of battle and tried to harm them, yet was completely overlooked. The proximate observation remained quite impressive, and observing foes flee, their limbs waving wildly, felt highly gratifying, but it would’ve been cool to effectively strike targets with my burning arrows.
