There are some video games that just manage to capture something perfectly, they are individual and like nothing that comes before or after them. Anno 1701 is definitely one of those games, and in its DS form there’s nothing that comes close.

It’s a pretty simple story: two rival kingdoms compete to be the dominator of the New World, but it also contains traitors, pirates, war, and more. There are many characters, too, both heroes and villains. Pirate Captain Red, his daughter Carmen, swashbuckling hero Victor LeRoi, and arch-villain and traitor Francois Bataille.

The gameplay is like many other city builders of this type. You start out with a patch of empty land, build some houses, put down a couple of roads, and wait for inhabitants to move in and start paying you taxes. To keep them happy you need to supply them with certain goods. This originally starts out as just food, but as your inhabitants become more advanced, they start demanding things like wool, spices, sugar, and eventually diamonds. You need to harvest wood and quarry and mine stone and iron ore to give you the materials to build all these things, and only certain islands can grow specific things.

You also need to build civic buildings: a fire station, hospital, and guardhouse (like a police station), to keep the inhabitants safe, and buildings such as a tavern and bathhouse that keep your inhabitants happy and let them advance to new levels of civilization, rising from the starting point of basic Pioneers, and eventually up to the highest level, Aristocrats.

One really interesting thing about Anno 1701 is that it also has a level of real-time strategy game about it, too. Not in a massive way, but enough to make it more interesting. Certain buildings, like warehouses and markets, can accommodate troops, you train these in your barracks, and move them into other buildings and these provide defence when you’re attacked by enemies. Conversely, you an also attack other characters islands by building warships and loading them with soldiers.

Gameplay is largely easy once you’ve got the hang of it, though there are disaster modes you can turn on and off, which means your island can suddenly be destroyed by a volcano erupting, but there is plenty in Anno to keep it interesting.

Really, one of the most amazing thing about it is the graphics. For a DS based game, they are really amazing. All of the buildings have a historical look to them, as do the ships, and you can see characters moving around on the map. If there’s a fire, a fireman will come out of the station pushing a handcart and race to the burning building to extinguish the flames.

What goes on in the background is also interesting. Animals move in and out of the forests, and rivers and the sea are animated. All backed with a brilliant soundtrack that mixes in the kind of post-medieval/Georgian styles that you’d expect for a game set (more or less) in this period.

Settlements, volcanos, pirates, war, traitors, and diamonds; Anno 1701 really is the best city-builder/strategy game available for the DS.