1701 A.D. is perhaps the perfect example of a game done truly right.
Gameplay is simple without seeming shallow or contrived; gorgeous presentation is scalable enough for old systems, while still allowing those with high-end systems to see a fair amount of eye candy; the game is approachable by any age group; the game features a built-in illustrated encyclopedia instead of a boring manual; the game’s default tutorial is superb and covers nearly all of the features of the game.
Bad
The game world can feel a bit large at times; game could have used a day/night system.
City building games have seen their decline as of late, with few companies even bothering to try their hand at the genre that was once one of the most popular in the industry. The only two that come to mind are the age old SimCity, which saw its fourth installment in early 2003, and City Life, which attempted to bring the genre into a full three dimensions in 2006. Neither really achieved any great success though and in the end, the genre was left right where it was at the beginning of its decline in the first place – with very few games to call its own and a decidedly noticeable lack of originality. With this kind of slump in a genre, it’s surprising that such a simple game like 1701 A.D. holds just the kind of promise that it needs to make a comeback. Speaking realistically, 1701 A.D. isn’t going to accomplish the feat all on its own, but if developers can take a look at what fellow developer Related Designs puts on the table with this one game, there might be some truly noteworthy games in the city building genre in the future.
For those that might think that this is a brand new game to hit the market, you’re a little mistaken. 1701 A.D. is actually a sequel to another set of games with the same premise – pre-colonial American city building in the Caribbean. The first few games, developed by German studio Sunflowers, were superb games in their own right and sparked a healthy collection of fans on the internet. So it’s no surprise that 1701 A.D. arrived with a bit of fanfare in its native Germany. And it doesn’t seem like anyone cared that Sunflowers gave over the development reigns to fellow German developer Related Designs. But to be honest, they really shouldn’t. Related Designs has managed to capture the very essence of the series superbly, all while introducing a slew of new features that make the experience that much more astounding.
When you first get 1701 A.D. going, you’re treated to what’s only the beginning of an amazing presentation. The introduction movie is well animated and voice acted – to the point where you might actually want to watch it again because it’s just that good – and is full of thunderous bass and excitement. When you finally get the game’s main menu, you’re treated to something that a lot of people might not be used to in a game like this - a real-time three dimensional menu. While this may seem like all show, it’s really not and the reason becomes apparent when you hit the options menu. As you play around with the video settings, you’ll notice that the detail of the menu changes based on the settings you’ve chosen. So not only is the menu simply there for you to choose how things work, but it’s designed to give you a basic approximation of how the game will look and run on your system. This is another thing that 1701 A.D. does really well – it runs on a wide range of systems regardless of what kind of graphical horsepower they have. Sure, there’s the standard eye candy for those with monster rigs; normal mapping, HDR, and camera settings specifically geared for widescreen resolutions, but even if you turn the settings down a notch, the game will still look amazing. It only goes to show that Related Designs knows exactly what they’re doing because a scalable game is a game that’s going to sell more copies.
After you’ve got everything working the way you want it, prepare to have some fun. 1701 A.D. is as approachable as it is relaxed. There’s nothing in the game that’s going to give you any frustration and if there anything happening that confuses you on the off-chance, the game will likely tell you exactly what’s wrong and how to fix is sooner or later. It’s this ease of use and well-designed simplicity that makes 1701 A.D. as much fun as it is.
The basics of 1701 A.D. are city building. You’re given a randomly generated Caribbean themed map that you’ve been tasked with colonizing. At the very outset, all you’ve got to your name is an island and a small warehouse. In the initial stages of the game, your main goal is simply to get a few colonists to settle on your island and provide them with everything they need to survive. That factors out to become food to eat and wood to building things with, which is where the game’s simple production system comes into play. In 1701 A.D., production is broken into two or three sections. The first section is your main raw material creation. If there’s a clay pit on your island, the first section in clay production is going to be the Clay Pit. The second section of production is going to be the brickworks and later on the in the game, there’s other things that you can add to this production chain to make nicer things for your colonist. And once the bricks are complete, the merchant wagons will come from your warehouse and take it back, adding to your colony’s goods stockpile, provided that you’ve linked these production buildings to your warehouse with a couple of road. If there are no roads between your warehouse and the building, the wagons can’t get to them and the building shut down because they’re too full of stuff to make more. Your goods stockpile is the very essence of your colony. The amount and type of goods in your warehouse stockpiles is directly responsible for the happiness of your colonists. In the initial stages of the game, all they want is wood, tools, food, and a little bit of cloth. Once you’ve given them ample amounts of all that, your colonists pretty happy. Keep all of your colonists happy and you have a surefire way to collect taxes and earn your colony’s income.
This basic structure proceeds even into the later stages of the game. The structures gets mixed up a little bit here and there – for instance, in order to get your colony to upgrade itself with a new look and settler level, you’ll sometimes need to build a certain number of kind of building to make your colonists happy. Your early settlers will eventually want a school to keep their little tykes happy and if you don’t buy one, they’ll get angry at you and hall themselves off to another colony. And if you’re ever wondering what your colonists need exactly to proceed to the next settler level, all you need to do is click on the town square. The display that comes up will tell you exactly how happy your colonists are and how happy they are with every individual need they have. If things are green, then you’re doing a good job, but if things are red, there’s some work that needs to be done.
Outside of these economic features, 1701 A.D. provides everything most city building games provide. There are natural disasters that can strike from time to time, such as hurricanes and small building fires, or there’s the random pirate raid. Pirate raids tend to pretty well demoralize your citizens and once this happens, it’ll be time to strengthen your own defense in case they decide they want to come back for a second go. And this is where the other half of the game’s mechanics comes in. Should you need to defend yourself, you have all of the things you need to do so. Raising a militia is as simple as place the militia building into your colony and recruiting troops much like an RTS, although simplified. You can also surround your colony with watch towers and walls if you feel it’s necessary. Sometime during the early stages of the game, you’ll also come across the ability to build a shipyard that can in turn manufacture ships to go head to head with the pirate galleons, but for the most part it’s easier to wait until the pirates make land on their next raid and take them on with your troops.
A lot of this interesting, yet simple gameplay would be useless without a decent presentation to go with it, but Related Designs gives us much more than simply decent presentation. 1701 A.D. boasts some of the most impressive visuals seen to date in a game of this type. The game makes full use of all the latest technologies such as high dynamic range lighting, normal and parallax mapping, Shader Model 3.0 effects, and special modes for those folks using 16:9 or 16:10 widescreen monitors. The game world is littered with tons of great things to pad out the atmosphere, such as birds and a large array of natural wildlife to set your gaze on. To top it all off, the game features a special "screenshot mode”, which switches the camera to an angle that’s low to ground and casts a depth of field shader on the distance to make everything sort of look like one of those model towns you’d see in a hobby shop. The effect is astounding to see in actions and after trying it out a few times, you’ll wish that more strategy games would use this kind of features. But although the visuals in 1701 A.D. are impressive, you can’t help but feel like they could have added some additional things to round it all off. Day and night cycling would have been a great thing to add here and the absence of this kind of features really sticks out given everything else that’s in the presentation.
On the audio side of things, 1701 A.D. couldn’t get any better. Granted, there’s not a lot of voice work in a game like this, but it’s worth noting that there isn’t a single voice in this game that’s going to grate on your nerves. All of the opposing characters that are available are superbly voiced and none of them seem out of place in the world you’re inhabiting in-game. Aside from that, the voice acting in the game’s introductory movie deserves special mention because it blends perfectly into the tone of the visuals and the accompanying music is simply divine and will make you want to turn your surround sound setup all the way to full blast. The in-game music is of equally high caliber – it never gets on your nerves and it’s just low enough that you can still hear it, but it doesn’t get in the way of the incredible amount of atmosphere sounds the game throws your way.
In the end, 1701 A.D. is perhaps the perfect example of a game done truly right. This kind of quality is unexpected from a game released in a genre that’s been seen as dying for years now and from a developer that hasn’t really gotten a taste of any kind of limelight. Between the high quality of visual presentation to the simple depth of its gameplay, 1701 A.D. is fun for the entire family and the prime example of how an approachable city-building sim should be done.