Lack of tutorial aside though, Anno 1404 isn’t fundamentally different from any other strategy game that puts the focus much more on economic management than on combat – which doesn’t show up until relatively late in the campaign mode. This isn’t a hypothetical example either by the way we got stuck at that point for at least two hours and couldn’t upgrade our population despite maxing out all their satisfaction bars and giving them plenty of everything.

You’ll have to trawl through your quest log to get an explanation of how you might go about building a rope yard, for example, and the only clue you’ll be given is that you don’t have enough citizens yet – but there’ll be no tips on how you go about upgrading your peasants. Nor does the campaign always explain everything in great detail. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that on the face of it, but in reality not everybody will want to play through an entire singleplayer game just to learn the intricacies of the diplomacy system. In effect then, the campaign mode really is the tutorial for the game. There’s no real tutorial for you to consult about how to best plan a trade route and the manual which came with our review copy of the game was about as helpful as throwing a drowning man both ends of a rope. Dawn of GameplayUnfortunately, if the campaign mode doesn’t appeal to you as much as it did to us then you’re likely to be stuck until you figure out the controls and intricacies of the game for yourself.

Anno 1404 tutorials