Anno 117: Pax Romana is the latest entry in the Anno franchise, coming 6 years after the release of Anno 1800. Our review is specifically for the PS5 console version and we tested it with Keyboard & Mouse as well as DualSense controller.
Anno 117: Pax Romana PS5 Review
As the name suggests, Anno 117: Pax Romana takes place in the year 117 AD during the time of Roman Peace. Even though that’s 1700 years time difference to the prior game, it feels like an almost exact carbon copy of Anno 1800, just with some visual changes to buildings and production lines. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Anno 1800 is my favorite in the franchise, so I felt right at home. However, if you’ve played lots of Anno 1800, it feels closer to a cosmetic DLC than a new game.
Building your settlement and seeing it grow is as fun as ever. The gameplay loop is the same as other Anno games: you start with basic settlers, then to grow your island you must fulfill the ever-growing needs of your population, which get more complex. The more high-class settlers you have, the more income you earn from their houses. So fulfilling their needs is essential to balance your economy. Eventually, you run into the problem that your island isn’t fertile for certain production lines, so you must build ships to settle other fertile islands or trade with other factions. The game offers a campaign with objectives, as well as Endless Mode where you can play as you like. There is multiplayer too, so you can play with friends in Co-Op or in competitive mode.
Endless mode supports two worlds: Latium which is the easier map for beginners, and Albion which features more aggressive raiders and marshlands. There are also multiple difficulty settings. If you’ve never played an Anno game you will definitely get a lot of playtime out of it as you learn the game and advance through the difficulties.
The PS5 version has some technical quirks, however. Playing with DualSense controller is infuriatingly inefficient compared to Keyboard & Mouse and the UI feels frustratingly cluttered. This is not a problem unique to Anno but applies to any complex strategy or city building game on consoles. The good news is that Anno 117 supports Keyboard & Mouse on PS5 from the get-go! Simply plug in any USB keyboard and mouse to your PS5 and the game will automatically recognize it. This setup works best when you play at your desk on a monitor, but is suboptimal for living room setups on your couch. Without keyboard and mouse I don’t think it’s worth dealing with the console edition and you’re better off playing on PC. The only advantage I see to playing it on PS5 is that you don’t need to worry about whether your PC specs can handle it or not. If you have a good enough PC I’d go with the PC version any day.
One cool feature on PS5 is that the game allocates over 1GB for save games. Even Sony’s first-party games typically limit you to only ten saves or so. Anno 117 lets you keep a huge amount of saves, which is essential for a game like this.
Ubisoft does deserve praise here for bringing a strategy game to console at launch. Normally, strategy games are only ported to console years later, or not at all. But the PS5 version doesn’t always work how it should. When I started my review on Patch 1.10, the Drag & Drop feature wasn’t even supported with a Mouse plugged in. For example, it wasn’t possible to plant fields by dragging the mouse and you had to click each square individually. This was fixed in Patch 1.20, just in time for launch. So be sure to update your game. Another problem is that the mouse cursor seems to have a slight lag, despite playing with a wire-connected mouse that has no lag on PC. I tested this with two mice (although this could partially be a PS5/firmware limitation getting in the way).
The slight delay in mouse cursor is noticeable but you get used to it, and it beats playing with a controller any day. Graphics-wise the PS5 Pro version feels comparable to “low” settings on PC. When you select characters for a new game the character textures are slow to load in, and background videos in menus look more pixelated than a 360p video on YouTube. It doesn’t look like you’d expect from a current-gen PS5 Pro version. That said, the game always ran at a stable framerate for me.
I also often got weird UI elements that stayed on the screen permanently until I rebooted the game. For example, a question mark that leads to nowhere out the bounds where you can’t go. Clearly a visual bug because a game reboot fixed it. Other times I kept getting the same gameplay hint pinned on the screen or popping up repeatedly and having to close it again. These are not rare incidents either. I kept having to reboot the game multiple times every game session to get rid of UI errors.
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The campaign also has weird UI fumbles and nonsensical requirements. There’s an objective for someone’s birthday where all objectives markers disappeared on me. Up to that point you get maximum handholding on what to do, but here it got confusing what the story wants from me. Another time, the story wants you to build three buildings to make Garum (fish sauce) for a birthday, but then you only need to deliver five tons for the objective, which a single building would have produced within a few minutes. It’s like the story is teaching you to waste resources instead of optimizing production chains. You can’t settle other islands in the story right away either, so you can’t develop other production chains while waiting on story objectives to complete.
Overall, I enjoyed it as much as Anno 1800. If you’re into strategy and city building games, you can’t go wrong with Anno 117: Pax Romana. But if you have a choice between PC and PS5, go with PC.
Anno 117: Pax Romana delivers the same satisfying city-building loop as Anno 1800 but offers little innovation beyond a Roman skin. While still fun and deep for newcomers, veterans may find it more like a reskin. The PS5 version suffers from mediocre graphics, hard to navigate UI, and awkward controller support – but keyboard and mouse are supported. Good game, flawed console port essentially.
Review code kindly provided by PR.
Anno 117: Pax Romana releases for PS5 on November 13, 2025.