In between all my other gaming (*cough* World of Warcraft), I’ve found time to play through Civilization Revolution. This is the newest in my long beloved Civ series, first time ever designed from the ground up for consoles. I got the Xbox 360 version because I love achievements (love them!). Today I wrapped up my achievement collection, getting the last one to bring me to the full 1000 tally. Now that I’ve done that I feel like I’ve pretty much finished the game and could give my thoughts.
It retains the general flavor of a Civ game - you start from the dawn of civilization with a single settler unit to build a city with. A lot of the general gameplay is quite familiar to long time Civ players, but the presentation is very much for the console. The graphics are bright and colorful, the interface is streamlined, and you have less micromanaging to do.
Overall, I think they did a really nice job, conceptually. The flow of gameplay is nice and the console controls work well. But I have a few major problems with the game. The first is a bit insurmountable, I’m afraid. I like all the complexity of the PC versions of Civ. All the streamlining they did to put it on console removed a lot of the gameplay that I quite like. Overall, the console version can’t quite win my heart away from the PC. But for newcomers to the game it will probably be a great introduction.
The next two problems are with game balance and bugs. I feel like the game forces you to play a particular way. You can either rush and take out your enemies before they build up their culture, or you can settle in for the long haul in which case you better have enough culture or you will lose. Culture is a concept the Civ series introduced in its third installment. Basically, buildings in your cities generate culture, and each city has a cultural border that grows out around it. As this cultural border comes up against other civs, it can swallow them up and cause their cities to become yours without a single act of war. In the PC versions, there are more ways to prevent the cultural flip than there seem to be on the console. I found that going for a military strategy in the middle of the game without any culture was totally futile as I’d take a city only to have it flip back to its previous owner a couple turns later. Argh.
And then there are the numerous bugs. The pathing is really bad. I’ve seen two major issues - one where you send a unit to a far away destination and it starts going in a direction that won’t actually get it there. It then will go back and forth until you stop it, never getting to its goal. The other is that sometimes it doesn’t pick the shortest path. I have to micromanage the legs of the journey to keep my units from going the longer way around. Grr.
Last negative is big for me, considering I’m an AI engineer. The enemy AI is just frustrating and bad. This is a game that should be in large part about diplomacy. But the opponents in this game just hate you if you’re winning and hate you if you’re losing. If you have a lot of gold, they demand you give it to them and go to war if you don’t. If you have a lot of culture they might just declare war on you because that pisses them off. There’s no way to have an amiable relationship with anyone except by constantly giving in to their demands. Plus I’ve seen the AI try to send settlers repeatedly in the wrong direction, where they’re getting trapped by my cultural borders but they could just go the other way instead and settle plenty of open land. I think the diplomacy could have really been improved, it was so much better in the PC versions. Maybe Soren should have been called in as a consultant!
Anyways, I certainly played a lot of it, gathering up those achievements. I haven’t played multiplayer at all yet, though I checked out some forums today and it sounds pretty unbalanced, like there’s only one really strong winning strategy. Doesn’t sound compelling to me! So I’m probably done with Civ Rev for now, until they patch it or something. Maybe I’ll go play a game of Civ 4 instead…
