SIMPLY AWESOME

It's a "yes", but a weak one. It's best not to compare this to other Anno titles. Mechanics are distinct enough that this may as well be a title in a different series. A quick note about reviewers talking about the world market not functioning: for the past week I've been playing it has worked fine for me.

The way I think about this game is as a "time/money management" game rather than a "strategy" or even a traditional management game. Unless you explicitly enable lose conditions, nothing can end your run and you will eventually win. This may sound confusing as there are enemies and combat encounters, and it is confusing.

The main draw of this game - and the best-developed mechanic - is cost optimization. You have citizens with needs, and must satisfy these as cheaply as possible (mostly in terms of money/energy/labor, later also by reducing resource requirements). Balancing the of number of workers, income, and energy is the core gameplay loop here: building up lower-tier workers to fund resources required to promote them to higher (and better-paying) tiers, being careful about exactly when to expand energy production and add a higher-tier production line. Difficulty settings are largely about influencing how tight your margins are and how many distractions you will have while trying to solve these problems. Dealing with an enemy invasion for 10 minutes means you're not expanding your next production line or solving a resource shortage crisis. Similarly: doing a side mission that nets you ~$20,000 credits in a few minutes is weighed against whether you're waiting to afford your next building.

As hinted: there are enemies that attack regularly, but this system is poorly designed. Combat is trivial, clunky, and shallow - units are difficult to control well and too unresponsive for you to meaningfully sway combat more than "attack this unit". Combat situations in general are very slow to resolve - your ships feel slow, enemy ships stick to their patrols even in combat and have enough hitpoints that for most of combat you aren't doing anything actively. Much of combat takes place in mostly-optional missions on other maps disconnected from normal gameplay. On the plus side, combat is easy, but on the minus side it means any interaction is a chore. You are effectively forced into interacting with the combat systems when your maps are "invaded" by enemy ships, which provide huge negative economic disadvantages until swatted away. There is no way to stop invasions or even means of providing passive defenses, so whenever an invasion happens you will need to stop whatever you're doing and spend ~10 minutes mopping up enemies. There's also a delay to deploy your fleet (since your fleet leaves your map whenever used elsewhere), making this process even more painful.

Overall, this is on the good side of "meh". Had this not been called an "Anno" title, it would have been better received. Similarly, I think there is a novel, interesting vision buried under some of these systems, and I hope one day there is a game that does it better.

Building placement rarely matters significantly - there are abstract "logistics" numbers that represents how far away buildings are from services buildings, but otherwise placement is arbitrary and there's no incentive to co-locate parts of a production chain on a given map.

I really like this game. This has been the first game for me from the Anno franchise and while some may say this is the most disappointing entry, I have enjoyed my time with it. Most of the complaints I have heard is that this game lacks identity and complexity. This being the first Anno game for me, I cannot complain about the complexity. To clarify, I started my first ever playthrough with the Revolutions Mod installed as I learnt about this game from a Youtube playthrough. I have not played the vanilla game but I have heard it is more shallow and lacks several obvious features.

The Pros:
I think this game is a great way to get into the Anno franchise. It starts relatively easy and does not get too complex throughout the span of the game. You definitely do not need to be looking at any sort of guides or mechanics online while playing, everything will come naturally.
The sector projects and quests are generally pretty fun and add a nice change of pace from simply expanding your corporation. In fact, they are primarily the main driving factors for expanding.

The Cons:
This game is definitely not perfect. Some mechanics are poorly explained or not very intuitive.
SERVERS - as of writing this review 04/08/2024, the servers are down (for an exclusively single player game, woo go Ubisoft) which presents a headache. First of all, you cannot trade with the global market which is a huge pain as that means you are left to produce every single item yourself as there is no way of automatically buying them, this makes the game even more shallow but at the same time more tedious and slow. The voting committee is also broken meaning it will not work at all.
ACHIEVEMENTS - this means several achievements are not possible to obtain without 3rd party software (there is an achievement for playing a mobile candycrush type game after connecting it to your Ubisoft account that has stopped existing on any platform store long ago). There are a lot of achievements in this game while some are hard and some are not but at the end of the day it is impossible to achieve 100% completion without cheating.
DLCs - I want to say all the DLCs are quite lackluster and do not offer many new mechanics. Since this game is old and typically offered with all DLCs this will not be such a big issue as more content at the end of the day is still more content.

In Conclusion:
This game is worth a shot, especially if on sale. I think it is a good Anno game to get into the franchise but probably one of the least complex and innovative ones.