While not a historically accurate representation of the times, 1701 A.D. does attempt to give you a feel for what early life in the Americas was like. Well, more appropriately, it’s a representation of the Caribbean island. Each game features any number of randomly generated islands for you to settle and colonize. You start by building a warehouse and then proceed to build homes, farms, bakers, and my personal favorite, the distillers! Every good settler needs booze! However, each island only contains certain natural resources and what there is, is limited in amount. You’ll have to venture by boat to other islands to gather more resources that you may need or embark on trade routes with your other neighboring islands.

Your main goal is to simply keep your people happy. By giving them what they want, they will, in turn, become more advanced and give you access to greater supplies and research and buildings with which to advance your colonies even further. If you can advance yourself sufficiently and prove yourself, the Queen may even be forced to grant you your independence. Each game is completely open ended and you can play for as long or as little as you like.

While there are a number of different victory conditions you can set for each game, ranging from total wealth to the size of a castle to be built, there is also a sandbox mode. This allows you to play and build your small nation up into a grand power. I’m normally the type of gamer who prefers a more structured approach to gameplay such as different missions of increasing difficulty and options available, but I enjoyed the open-ended gameplay and found that time would just fly by. On more then one occasion the game suggested that I had been playing for too long at a stretch and I should maybe stretch my legs a bit! Needless to say, yet I’ll say it anyways, the true gamer in me shut that message up and continued to play.

A game as deep as this, you had better hope that the tutorial is up to par…and it is…for the most part. The tutorial does an excellent job of explaining the basics to you, but it seems to spend much too little time on trading and no time at all on any form of military training. While fighting makes up only a small portion of the game, it would have been nice to have some details on this before I got my pioneer-butt handed to me!

This is one of the most gorgeous looking city building games I’ve yet seen. The game is fully 3D and you can zoom in and out and even rotate the map. One thing I would’ve liked is the option to re-center the camera on a fixed degree. Too often I find that I rotate the camera to get a better look at something and I end up losing my bearings. I’d be a horribly navigator at sea! The variety from each tier of structure is astounding and easily discernable at a quick glance once you get familiar with the style and all the models are very well done with a surprising amount of detail as you zoom in close.

As much fun as I had with this game, there is still room for improvement. I found road-building, which is needed to give your workers a path to carry different goods from building to building, was needlessly tedious. In addition, not all structures require roads and I found no clear way to tell exactly which structures those were. There is also no way to get a quick summary of all of your settlements and structures. When you’ve got six or seven large cities to manage, it would’ve been nice to be able to get a quick spreadsheet like view of all of them. While not a big factor, it still would’ve been a nice inclusion for those who really like to micro-manager.

Having got my nit-picking out of the way, I want to add how surprised I was at the richness and complexity available in this game. While some of the depth may put off fans expecting more of a real-time strategy warfare title, sim-fans will rejoice at the amount of options and depth in the gameplay. Pick up this game and you just might find the time flies by for you, too.