I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
I disagree on the falling off point. Act 2 has that funnel, pulling you into the final showdown at the end of the act. It is cinematic, epic, and such a great ending to the act that it feels like an ending to the game (which it technically is, since there’s an optional ending at the end of the act). The problem really begins with act 3, since the tight narrative choices at the end of act 2 primes you for a tight, claustrophobic narrative for the third act as you race against the clock to the finish and instead… it’s the biggest act in the entire game, with the most amount of side quests, most of which aren’t optional if you want all of the origin characters to have good endings. You’ll even stop leveling up about halfway through act 3, so the reward feedback loop really dies off in this act. Makes the ending so incredibly hard to complete.
I agree with this so much - the end of act 2 was such a narrative high I was excited to see how they topped it!
And then they didn’t. And then I stopped levelling. It wasn’t the climax to the story I was expecting.
I always struggled to describe what was so disappointing but you hit the nail on the head. Starting act 3 felt like I was sent in time back to act 1 - aimlessly wandering around the map until finally stumbling across the next main story point.