On one hand, I like the casualness of this Anno clone. You can play at a slower pace, sail your ships almost like in a mini-action game, and face no real dangers. The game rarely throws challenges at you. On the other hand, there are almost no original ideas; everything feels copied or gutted. You could argue that sea battles are somewhat fresh, but they exist in Anno 1800 as well, and this feature severely lacks polish in terms of animations, steering, firing, and pathfinding.

I can't shake the feeling that the whole "pirate" city builder layer was an afterthought, added after they decided not to go for another type of Anno reskin. How come the most basic need building for a pirate society is a Marketplace? The second item, after Fish, that they need to advance in Pirate society standing is Rope. They also can't advance further if they don't have access to a Prison! Prisons make them feel safe. Pirates.

Some other design decisions are also surprising, such as the total lack of any production and consumption values. You heard that right: in a game about building production chains, you don't know how much your people consume. You have to build your production based on gut feeling or wait five minutes to see if the resource number drops, considering transportation as well.

If you really want it, get it at least at a 50% sale. Otherwise, if you want a similar but proper and serious city builder, go play Anno. If you want a piratey vibe and want to build a city, go play Tropico 2.

I hate to knock this game too much, because the theme of it is enjoyable and it's very nice looking. It's a decent light city builder/resource management game with a enjoyable pirate theme.
The music is good, the sea shanties are delightful, the graphics are crisp, but it suffers from the same problem that a lot of these games do - you're ultimately just juggling resources around to fulfill arbitrary goals that the game sets for you. The ol' "collect 10 of this resource" thing. The problem is that there's no indication of how to fix the supply problem, and no way to tell your people to stop consuming something so that you can get past the aggravating arbitrary goal so that you can move on with the game.
I'm not very patient, so when I have 10 pig farms and 10 butchers and still no meat in my inventory, I either want the game to tell me why, what the problem is, or how to fix it or I'm going to quit playing it. If I hit a brick wall, I'm going to uninstall it and move on.
So I'm uninstalling it and moving on. It's not a bad game. In fact, I enjoyed a lot of it. I guess I just need more in-game info on what's going on with the economy and how to manipulate it correctly. All I was able to figure out was "just build more and hope it works".
That strategy eventually failed, and I'm stuck right at the end of the game with no understanding of how to move forward.

I wanted to like this game. But When you can get Anno 1800 and Season 1 from them for the same price of this game. I can not recommend this game. Its basically Anno Lite. Its missing every thing that made Anno good. So every thing Anno has this game has but dumbed down that a 2 year old can play. My first thoughts was wow this is a great start lets see where they take this, then I noticed this was not an early access and this is a completed game. No No No not worth the money. It feels like its only half done. I would Recommened Anno 1800 over what ever this is. And Yes I do own Anno 1800 and All of its DLC's and Love them.