I've owned this game called 1602 AD for a number of years now, and since I have nothing better to do I'll do a review about it.
1602 AD, called Anno 1602 outside of North America, is a typical colony management game. You start out with a ship full of supplies and go to an island to set up your colony. The aim of the game is basically to make your colony as large and prosperous as possible, which you do by taxing your population, producing goods such as food and cloth and engaging in war with your competitors if necessary. 1602 AD comes with over 40 scenarios, 5 in-game tutorials and over 30 scenarios (but in the Anno 1602 version there's only 20), as well as a multiplayer option where players exchange IP addresses and play in multiplayer scenarios.
1602 AD is a game suited for people who enjoy slower-paced games, because all of the scenarios except the very first ones take hours to finish (trust me, I've tried) and thus the game requires a lot of patience to play. The main issue here is that it takes a bit of time producing goods such as building materials, which makes your colony building a lot slower, though you can use keyboard shortcuts such has F7 to pick up the pace (F7 quickens things by 3x). Even then, the resource gathering is still a bit slow, and considering your population needs a lot of resources to move on to the next civilization level, you might take hours just to get your settlement to Citizen level (level 3/5).
The combat in 1602 is also really disappointing, mainly because of the predictable AI. For instance, you can drop one soldier on some corner of your opponent's island and watch as the AI throws all his soldiers forward to get annihilated by your ship's cannons. Naval combat fares little better because AI ships never fight in groups, so you can just spam warships and scout out the enemy to defeat them. It also gets hampered from lack of instruction, as how you put soldiers on to ships (and therefore on to the enemy's island) isn't even explained in the game (for those who don't know, it's CTRL+click ship) and it doesn't explain how to heal your soldiers, how to claim your enemy's base as your own and stuff that really could have made your game a lot easier. This isn't helped by some crummy graphics, where a lot of the soldiers look alike, and you could be sending cavalry with swords to attack a big stone watchtower which isn't the best idea.
1602 AD works best as a economical management game. Your population requires a variety of goods, some of which you can't produce on your city island. Therefore, you will either have to settle an island with the necessary resources or trade with the AI. Balancing operating costs of your plantations and factories while maintaining a positive account balance will require a lot of creativity, and this is where 1602 is most rewarding. Eventually, in the higher civilization levels where your cities will be home to thousands of people, some slight mismanagement will cause a famine or some shortage of liquor, and since your people are amazingly sensitive to their needs, they'll start leaving your city in droves which means less taxes which means you'll probably have a negative account balance which means bankruptcy which means game over. So balancing your trade routes and production facilities and space are central to the game, and you'll soon be tinkering over where best to put your tobacco fields and plantation.
If you can get past its flaws, mainly the lethargic pacing and a predictable AI, 1602 AD is quite a fun economical strategy game and should be able to addict you for quite a while. There's a strange charm to it, whenever you think "OK I'll just put that house down and I'll be out of here." and find yourself still on the computer hours later. 1602 AD is a good game, and you owe it to yourself to give it a try.
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