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Ubisoft soft-launches ANNO: Build an Empire in Canada for iPad - its deep, F2P city-builder

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Ubisoft soft-launches ANNO: Build an Empire in Canada for iPad - its deep, F2P city-builder

Ubisoft has soft-launched its free to play city-building strategy game ANNO: Build an Empire in Canada for iPad.

The ANNO series has been running for a long time on PC and been very successful. It has you colonizing islands by building huge cities upon them.

This iPad version uses the touchscreen to allow for precision placement of buildings and the like. As is always the case with the ANNO games, there's a huge number of resources and constructions available.

The main idea is to keep your villagers happy, growing a city that gets bigger alongside the population increase.

But to succeed, you'll need to trade in goods and engage in diplomacy. Luckily, you're able to converse with both AI-run cities and those created by your friends.

ANNO: Build an Empire

We previously caught wind of Build an Empire's arrival on iPad and had plenty of fears about it.

We still have a bad taste in our mouth from previous free to play strategy games making the jump from PC to mobile (looking at you, Dungeon Keeper and Rollercoaster Tycoon).

It's never a good sign if a game requires you to have an online connection in order to play it (despite it mostly being single player), too.

While the jury's still out on Build an Empire, we'll have to hope that Ubisoft hasn't repeated the mistakes of others.

We'll let you know when ANNO: Build an Empire is available globally.

Chris Priestman
Chris Priestman
Anything eccentric, macabre, or just plain weird, is what Chris is all about. He turns the spotlight on the games that fly under the radar.