Anno 117's Pax Romana's Best-Kept Secret Reveals Itself as a Breathtaking First-Person Perspective.
Hold on — were you aware you can play Anno 117 Pax Romana in first-person? Should that be your response, your surprise matches as I was the moment I learned this hidden feature. Allow me to temporarily abandon managing my empire, entrust it to a capable deputy, borrow a cart, and go for a joyride across the Roman world.
How to Access the First-Person View
As a city-building game, Anno 117 Pax Romana is normally experienced from an overhead perspective. Yet, when you enter a secret combination — for example “Ctrl,” “Shift,” and “R” using PC controls alternatively “Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B/Circle, A/X” on a controller — you gain the ability to walk your domain as a common citizen. Given a comparable hidden feature appeared in Anno 1800, I was eager to test it in the latest installment, yet I had doubts it would operate prior to being stuck in a Celtic building (likely not meant to happen — this option tends to be prone to glitches now and then).
Exploring the Ancient Streets
Once I crawled out, I strolled the bustling streets across my settlement and visited markets, breweries, blossom gardens, and seafood collectors — the experience was splendid to observe all my hard work from a brand-new perspective. I observed a variety of intricacies that would escape notice from the top-down view: Front door decorations, a beast of burden holding a blossom container, fowl roaming freely, citizens lounging on their terraces… Simply noticing the form of a ledge and the paint layers on a column is quite interesting for those not residing in classical times.
Further Than Mere Wandering
However, there's additional content to Anno 117’s first-person mode aside from meandering through streets. I became extraordinarily excited upon discovering that not only could I look upon crop lands, but also enter them. And even though I thought structures would be inaccessible, I managed to access earthen quarries, investigate a respected schoolhouse while lessons were in session, and even trespass into people’s gardens. Don’t try to open any doors (not even the creators have the budget for that), yet it's completely feasible stroll around a barley farm, see citizens working with tools and burdens, and glance into any tiny hut provided the entrance is missing.
Visual Quality and Atmosphere
Although I was fully prepared to observe my settlement depicted in PlayStation 1 graphics, excluding a few unpolished motions and sometimes citizens positioned within a bench as opposed to atop a bench, the first-person view appears far superior to anticipations. The intricately designed surfaces (particularly rock faces) shouldn't logically be this impressive in what is still, essentially, a top-down game. You won't necessarily notice specific hair details, yet you will notice engravings on walls, sparks flying from torches, brick decoloration, eye details, and pine tree leaves. Nighttime, with its flickering fires and distant stellar illumination, creates a particularly moody setting, and feels much less frightening relative to the previous game, especially since the inhabitants no longer resemble terrifying apparitions anymore.
Discovery and Modification
Because the game's hidden immersive perspective doesn’t come with an instruction manual, I chose to test various actions, and quickly discovered the functions for jumping, dashing, and adjusting the view — the last option enabling me to switch between first and third-person views and revert. I then experimented with certain numeric keys and discovered that I could change my representative's visual design. Amber garment? Red toga? Blue and purple toga? Or — potentially preferable — armored suit? You might hold a weapon and defense, or, my favorite, don a marksman outfit; if you hit the interaction button, you shoot flaming projectiles upward. Should you be curious, harming inhabitants is impossible (not that I’ve tried, of course).
Comedy and Population Encounters
However, I had no desire to injure my people, as they're remarkably entertaining. Moments after I entered first-person mode, I overheard a father telling his child that he “Can’t have a pet fox and if you feed it one more chicken, your gran will have your head.” Appropriate response, paternal figure. One lovely local Celt then proceeded to praise my outstanding integration methods by calling it the “Best of both worlds,” meanwhile a grumpy senior female opted to menace me: “Say that one more time, and they’ll never find your body.”
The Joy of Joyriding
Just when I thought I had found everything available in Anno 117: Pax Romana’s first-person mode, I experienced the pleasure of driving through classical settlements. Entirely by accident, I clicked on a wagon and was promptly seated on the box. Bovines, equines, even manually drawn vehicles; you can control each one as desired. The ass-drawn vehicle, specifically, travels rather rapidly, though you shouldn’t imagine any GTA-like shenanigans — impacting citizens or additional vehicles cannot occur (once more, not admitting any attempts).
Fighting Restrictions
The sole aspect that let me down in Anno 117’s first-person mode was learning about my exclusion from in battle encounters. Equipped in warrior attire, I charged toward adversaries during active combat and tried to harm them, yet was completely overlooked. The proximate observation was still rather spectacular, and watching the enemy run, their arms flailing about, proved very satisfying, though it might have been amazing to successfully impact objects via my incendiary bolts.
