Gaming

Anno 117: Pax Romana is a relaxing city building experience

It’s challenging but engrossing.

Published

October 27, 2025

Luigi Leonardo

Growing up, city builders were my guilty pleasure. It’s fun to build a sprawling empire and to tear it all down again with an assortment of artificial disasters. Over time, the art of city builders was lost to more battle-oriented strategy games. Today, Ubisoft is keeping the genre alive through the Anno series. The upcoming Anno 117: Pax Romana will now take players to second-century Rome to build their own Roman city.

Though the game won’t be out for quite some time, Ubisoft gave us a sneak peek of its full build, and it’s just what you’d expect from the historical city builder.

A time of peace

As the name says, this is Pax Romana. Despite being set during the Roman period, you won’t find yourself fighting in the Punic Wars or fighting off armies of barbarians. It’s a relatively laidback experience.

The preview had us going through an entire ecosystem of Roman goods from simple woodcutter’s huts to enormous fields of lavender. The ecosystem even has garum, the Roman version of patis.

A lot of times, the plethora of buildable products don’t do much, other than satisfying the wants of different social classes. It does, however, make the game feel more immersive. It also adds long-term complexity because you’ll need to balance out all your citizen’s different needs.

The economic balancing is relaxing because there’s not much pressure to build a huge army. That said, conflicts can still be resolved with force. However, in the limited time offered by the preview, amassing a huge force was not a primary focus.

Building your way into a conspiracy

Like all games of the genre, Anno 117 has a serviceable storyline. To be fair, it’s not a story I’d lose sleep over. But it’s enough to push the narrative along and help you learn the ropes.

At the beginning, you can pick between two characters: Marcia and Marcus. Though both characters have slightly different stories, they still end in the same place with a powerful figure getting murdered.

In terms of gameplay, furthering the story isn’t the most compelling. A good chunk of the preview involves sending your flagship to another island to pick something up. Essentially, it’s a series of fetch quests.

I’m not sure how else a strategy game like this can add variety to the narrative, so this might be asking too much. At the very least, it’s a decent story to keep you playing.

Learning the ropes

As a tutorial, the story works to introduce the complex system. However, it isn’t as direct as I’d want it to be. There are times when the game wants me to build a certain item but doesn’t tell me how. For the first few hours, your experience is likely just about getting used to the interface. Rather than offering all the buildings you can have in categories, the interface organizes them according to their social class. So, all the plebian buildings are found in only one menu. It takes a while to get used to this.

Additionally, when you want to build a more advanced building, the interface does show a tree that details which smaller buildings you’ll need first. One small issue I had is the lack of a clear means to easily track which of the prerequisites are already present in your city.

Getting past the mire into paradise

That said, getting into a rhythm is easy. Because it doesn’t spoon-feed players on what to do, there is an enduring allure in discovering what else you can do to improve your city.

If you had a past playing with city builders, Anno 117 can reignite that feeling. To be fair, the game does not reinvent the genre. This is a very similar game to what came before. But if you’re looking for a decent builder set in an era that doesn’t usually get a lot of love, Anno 117: Pax Romana might be the game for you.

Gaming

You can play SNES games on this Nike shoe

The project celebrates the SNES’s 35th anniversary.

Published

November 27, 2025

Luigi Leonardo

Image source: Gustavo Bonzanini / Instagram

Have sneakerheads gone too far? While we’ve seen gaming-related collaborations before, no one has gone so far as to stick an actual console inside a sneaker before. But, then again, there’s a first time for everything. To celebrate the console’s 35th anniversary, a designer has packed a playable Super Nintendo Entertainment System (or SNES) inside a pair of Nike Air Max 90 sneakers.

Most collaborations of the same type usually incorporate inspired visuals onto the shoe. Some, for example, just add a console’s colors into the shoe’s design. The SNES-inspired show goes beyond by adding the console (or a version of it) into the shoe.

Designer Gustavo Bonzanini, who designed the SNES-packed shoe, added a small Raspberry Pi Zero W into the shoe’s tongue. The microcomputer was then programmed to emulate 16-bit games like Super Mario World. It even has the classic RCA cables so you can plug into an old TV for that additional nostalgia.

View this post on Instagram

The one thing it can’t do, however, is have a wired connection to the classic SNES controllers. Instead, Bonzanini customized the controller to have wireless connectivity. It’s a touch of modernity but ultimately adds to how impressive the effort is.

To top it all off, the console-slash-shoe can power gameplay for up to 30 minutes. It’s tiny, but it’s an art project after all.

That said, it’s not for sale. As cool as it is, the SNES Nike is only to celebrate the console’s 35^th birthday.

If you really wanted to, it’s not too difficult to play SNES in today’s age. Nintendo even offers the console in its Nintendo Switch Online subscriptions.

Gaming

Assassin’s Creed Shadows gets Attack on Titan-themed content

The story is available only until December 22.

Published

November 26, 2025

Luigi Leonardo

Ubisoft is no stranger to quirky DLCs, especially for the Assassin’s Creed franchise. One of its most infamous is Assassin’s Creed III’s The Tyranny of King Washington, which imagines an alternate reality (or as alternate as an Assassin’s Creed entry can get) where George Washington became a dictator. Now, the franchise is getting even wackier with an official tie-up with Attack on Titan.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the ongoing entry for the series. The title has players go on a journey of revenge in medieval Japan as the stealthy Naoe and the brutal Yasuke. Since launching, the game has gotten an expansion which adds an epilogue to the story. Today, a new update adds more content and a timed story.

A chunk of the update was already revealed previously. It contains a new story that has Naoe and Yasuke learn each other’s skills (or a version of them, at least). Adding to that story is a new quest tied to the popular Attack on Titan series. It also comes with custom gear and mounts based on the series.

Naoe and Yasuke travel to the enigmatic Crystal Cave to help a strangely garbed woman named Ada. A cult is threatening to initiate a deadly experiment on one of Ada’s friends, which might see the arrival of an actual Titan in medieval Japan. The story’s trailer ends with a brief tease on the aforementioned monster.

Though most of the update is for keeps, the Attack on Titan content will be available only from now until December 22.

Entertainment

Ubisoft confirms Far Cry live-action anthology series

Published

November 26, 2025

Luigi Leonardo

Months ago, Ubisoft accidentally announced that it is working with FX on a live-action adaptation of the Far Cry series. Today, the publisher finally confirmed the news and attached some notable names to the project.

Confirmed directly by the publisher via an official announcement, Ubisoft announced that FX has ordered a series based on the first-person adventure series. The show will be an anthology series with different characters and stories for every season. With that description, it sounds a lot like The White Lotus but with more guns.

The games themselves follow this same format. Each game has a different setting and set of characters. The last, for instance, featured Giancarlo Esposito as Anton Castillo, the dictator of a fictional South American country named Yara.

Helming the live-action project are two big names for Hulu: Noah Hawley and Rob Mac. Hawley recently earned his flowers through the recently concluded first season of Alien: Earth. Meanwhile, Rob Mac has been earning success after success with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

With those two helming the series, the upcoming Far Cry adaptation has the potential to make a name for itself in the videogame adaptation scene. These days, adaptations are rocking the airwaves with notable adaptations including Fallout and The Last of Us.