Ultimate Edition Review: Wall of Text edition! Updated as of 8/5/2017

In my opinion, this game is not recommended at full price compared to what its predecessors have. This game is also a tough sell. The only version that is recommended is the Ultimate edition.

I am starting with combat because in my opinion with the changes it should not be in. Anno’s 2205 combat is weaker compared to its past installments. Since there was a lot of changes made to trade routes, what ships you interact with, and now it’s a multisession singeplayer experience with different factions of your corporation on different maps. It has defeated why any combat should be in the game in the first place. It’s true the Anno franchise focus is not on combat but it’s past titles had purpose for it being in. With the new formula combat is just tack on feature. On the bright side you don't have to worry about pirates in the very begining of the game. You do have to worry about attacks with the frontier dlc but you don't have defensive structures or cool toys. Just a navy you have to call in to your sector. The game could have benefited if the feature was cut completely and resources + time could have been spent elsewhere. Also, the combat is force upon you for getting special resources.

Trade Routes are set up in the menu as always with some changes of course. You do not need a shipyard to build different ships to haul items for your citizens. You also don’t need to purchase the ship with currency and resources. It just goes onto your money budget expense. Also, you can only transfer one item per ship per island where in past games you can do multiple items and set it up for multiple islands.

The level design decent at best. I like the cool sector affects and special missions that get you special bonuses. Other than that, compared to its predecessors the game could use a map editor with community driven content to help the game replay value. Since they took out random map generation even though it did not make significant variety changes in the maps. It was enough to help the replay value of the game.

Note: Cities Skylines is a different city game but it offers tons of replay value with community driven content. Blue bytes should have taken note of this before making it a complete singeplayer experience. Not having community driven content when Cities Skylines does makes it hard to compete in the market. Ubisoft should have at least let them implement steam workshop support.

The NPCs interaction is weak sauce compared it predecessors. In Anno 2205 NPC interaction is mostly through quests, stock market, and trade with certain ones of course. Very limited where as in past games you compete not just in stock market but resources, military power, trade, and land. You also had diplomacy. This adds to another reason to remove combat.

The Orbital building is underwhelming. Instead of taking advantage that in space you can build in whatever direction you want you are limited to a 2D building plane. I had a lot more fun being amazed at building things on the moon. Building the Artic, Temperate, and tundra regions is also a lot of fun. This dies out with the limited map variety.

The different factions in your corporation require different regions. Scientists in tundra + Artic regions, employees in Temperate region, Engineers on the moon. All contribute to research on the Orbital station you built if you did not get too bored building it. This contributes to a problem the new anno game has compared to past games. Building variety in your main city. Past games you had three factions with different looking buildings in your main city. This is no longer the case.
This brings me to another main problem I have with this game, the multisession. You must load into every map to make a supply chain to satisfy and advance your faction in another region. You did not have this in other games. While I like making big cities. The tradeoffs they made to make big cities in this game was not worth it my opinion. I also notice they recycled assets from Anno 2070. While recycled is not unheard of. Some of the ways they do it looks bad.
Overall Anno 2205 is not a bad game. I like it but it has its faults. Something I would like to recommend at full price even to help the developers but compared to what you get in past games. You get your moneys worth with replay value in past installments. This could have been easily countered by mod support since they made this a singleplayer only experience.

Funfact for those who do not know who argue negative reviews make huge impacts on sales:
A study was done by the Susquehanna financial groups video game journal as well other studies have concluded there is little to no correlation between reviews and the resulting sale preformance. Aparently to some people this is not case though and think this one review will destory the frachise.

This review is overall is a work in progress.