Strategy games on mobile phones can be hit or miss at times. Luckily, Anno Create a new World, is a hit, or at least a close enough.
Anno tasks you with a helping your father’s troubled kingdom by exploring and expanding. Resources, food, allies and land are all needed and you are the one to find them. Each mission has a specific set goal - build a town of a certain size, gather a specific amount of something, etc.
I played the game on my Nokia N81 8GB which isn’t exactly made for gaming as far as I’m concerned, but works quite well. This game in particular requires a lot of button pressing as one would expect from the strategy genre and I had to turn off the keypad sound on the phone as it drove me nuts. Also, speaking of sound, the game only allows you background music, or sound effects. But never both at the same time. I guess it would have been too much of a strain on some mobile phones.
The graphics for the
game are quite good, even on the fairly small screen of the mobile phone things are easily discernible. Each building of course has its own unique look and yet they all still maintain a cohesiveness. The animations are good and they breathe life into the society as you build it.
The sound effects are well done as well and if they get annoying, which they generally didn’t, you can turn them off in favor of the background music which is fairly sedate and non-intrusive.
The real only problems I see is the menu and the movement. It’s all massive amounts of button pressing and there are two unused buttons on the 
keypad that could have been mapped to help facilitate less of that. But it’s a minor problem and like I said, strategy games generally require a lot of button pressing anyway.
Overall, it’s a good addition to the Anno series. It’s entertaining and engrossing. It looks and sounds good and the controls are, for the most part, accessible. The missions are somewhat redundant as you’re building the same things over and over again and it could get tiresome for some gamers.
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