Knights of the Cardboard Castle

So I bought the Complete edition of Anno 2070 on Steam a while back and recently decided to try playing it. But as you might have noticed, there aren’t any screenshots in this post. That’s because I couldn’t actually get the game to run. The game requires that Ubisoft’s proprietary Uplay service to be running, on top of the Steam platform itself. I’ve previously gotten it to work successfully with such games as Far Cry 3, Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. But for whatever reason I just could not get it to work with Anno 2070.

I tried deleting and reinstalling a couple of times, then I went to Ubisoft’s website and downloaded Uplay directly from there, had the game linked to my Uplay account and then downloaded it all over again directly from Ubisoft’s servers. But then the Anno 2070 autopatcher insisted on downloading a large number of patches before the game would run and it just kept flaking out on me. The autopatcher doesn’t even detect a failed download and automatically retry downloading. It just stops responding so that the only way to move on would be to constantly keep an eye on it, notice when it has stalled out, cancel the existing download and restart it.

It could well be that I have a crappy ISP here in Malaysia and that my network equipment is faulty in some way. Yet, for what it’s worth, I have no problems whatsoever downloading and updating games directly from Steam. So after a while of this frustration, I decided that life is too short to spend it on troubleshooting a mere game and I can live without playing Anno 2070 even though I’d already paid for it. Needless to say, I will be extremely reticent about buying Ubisoft games in the future if they continue to insist on using their silly Uplay platform.