I’ve been playing the Civ games for around 20 years and have played most of the games since III for a few hundred hours each. This series has a proud tradition of launching new titles that can’t hold a candle to the previous iteration with expansions and mods, and VII is no exception. As it stands, VI is a superior game in pretty much every way and I really don’t think I’d ever recommend a new player pick up VII instead of it. But you probably know that already. VII will get better as Firaxis releases expansions and modders do their thing, so the important question is whether or not VII is a solid foundation for what might come later. If you’d rather just play a complete 4X game now, I would highly recommend any other game in this series. Except Beyond Earth and Revolution, anyway.
I’ll say right away that one of the systems I was most concerned about, changing civilizations several times in the game, works better than I expected. It has some of the same struggles as Humankind in that it’s difficult to form a connection to a particular civ or keep track of who the AI is playing as at any moment, but it helps a little that leaders stay consistent throughout the game. The main reason it works better here is that the temporary civs have more personality: in addition to the unique features civs have had in the last few games, you also get a unique civics tree that unlocks extra abilities and gives you policies you can continue using for the rest of the game. I’m also a big fan of how several civs, in particular the Ming, have drawbacks that simulate the flaws that doomed their real world equivalents. Not all of the options are that interesting, but you’d expect the intro civs to be the most vanilla and there’s a lot of potential in this system.
Although having a single leader throughout the game does help ground the experience, the leaders themselves are extremely underwhelming. There are far too many leaders with multiple avatars in the starting cast, which makes it feel like you’re always playing with Ashoka or Napoleon simply because it’s so likely that one of your 8 opponents happens to be one of their variants. More importantly, most of the leaders just don’t do anything terribly interesting. My choice of leader never felt very important in any of my games, and the game does such a poor job of communicating why the AI leaders do what they do that I have no idea what their personalities are supposed to be. It could be annoying when Genghis Khan wouldn’t shut up about your lack of cavalry on an archipelago map in VI, but at least you knew what he was on about. In VII, you’ll face random denunciations and wars with no apparent cause.
That ties in to the flaw that’s been discussed the most, although to me it’s only the second biggest issue: the UI is among the worst I’ve seen in a strategy game. It seems like Firaxis focused entirely on making sure there was never too much information on screen at once, but they did so at the cost of almost never showing everything you need. A lot of this will likely be fixed quickly in patches. I’m sure the city UI will start showing more useful information, that the game will stop hiding important buttons, and that news notifications will become more useful. It’s more concerning that the game was released with so many objective flaws in its interface. Even if you consider everything I’ve mentioned before to be fine, there’s no defending how attempting to skip animations sometimes results in ending your turn, how the resource assignment interface frequently offers no explanation of why you can’t place a resource where you want, or how there’s no map search function in a game that constantly asks you to go find specific resources somewhere on the map. Crises can be even worse – you get a random one at the end of each era and the effects can range from almost completely disabling your ability to do anything to having basically no impact whatsoever based on your game state. I had one era end with a crisis that gave every city debilitating happiness penalties, which was impossible to handle after having done a military milestone, but another era ended with a pandemic that only infected a single city for a single turn before we completed the era. It gives an impression that this was pushed out before it was done.
That impression becomes a lot more solid once you start looking at the era milestones and crises, which are far and away the biggest problem with the game. It’s hard to believe that these were playtested at all. The milestones vary wildly in difficulty from ones it’s almost impossible not to achieve accidentally, like the Exploration Era’s military milestone, to ones it’s nearly impossible to achieve without deliberately ignoring every other option, like the Modern Era’s economic milestone. The problem is that they’re all about doing a certain thing a certain number of times, but they don’t scale to account for map type and don’t seem to have been calibrated against each other. Winning an Exploration economic milestone, for example, requires sailing 30 points of treasure fleets from the new world back to your old world cities, but getting treasure fleets at all requires learning a mid-era tech, settling near treasure resources that randomly spawned near the cost and away from existing cities, waiting 8 turns for a spawn, and then waiting for the ship to sail however far back to your old world empire. This takes forever, and meanwhile the military milestone can be trivially achieved by founding 6 new world settlements and buying missionaries convert them to your religion. You don’ need to fight anyone, you’ll need those cities anyway to have a shot at economic, and there’s even a religious belief that makes your cities spawn converted. The modern era just makes this even worse with an economic victory that requires slowly meeting a 500 point goal and then sending a great person to every single capital against military and scientific milestones that just need normal gameplay and a few city projects.
Numerous other smaller systems show similar signs of being half finished. Nuclear weapons are in the game, but you only get access to them by being one city project away from a win, so it’s not clear how you’re supposed to have time to build and use them. Religion is just an endless stupid slapfight because missionaries convert half of a city immediately and there’s nothing short of war that does anything to slow them down. Spying is constantly presented as a major thing you need to be concerned about, but the only thing you can do to stop it is counterspy against a single opponent at a time. It’s hard to tell at a glance how strong an opposing unit is because every civ has a unit that upgrades during the era without changing anything about its appearance or name. City state bonuses are very strong, but there’s no way to steal a city after someone else has become suzerain, so it’s basically just a race to use the befriend action on them after they spawn before they stop being relevant to anyone. You could fight them, but the low city limit means you’d probably be better off attacking another player directly. It’s also blatantly obvious that there will be a fourth era added to the game later because it’s full of bonuses and modifiers that do literally nothing without them. That probably explains why the game ends abruptly at an early-cold war tech level instead of extending past the modern day like every other Civ game.
To end on a slightly more positive note, I do like the way the tech trees now provide many more options on each turn. Most techs and civis have a mastery you can research after completing them that gives extra benefits, but all masteries are option. Between that and the secondary civ and ideology-specific civics trees, you often have five or more options for what to work on each turn instead of the three or fewer that most other games presented.
Conclusion
At this point, it’s difficult to say for sure how much potential this game has. I’m fairly confident that there’s an interesting idea here with better balancing, a fourth era, and more interesting civs/leaders. But even assuming Firaxis does patch all of that in, religion, city states, and diplomacy are fundamentally shallow experiences that need total overhauls to become anything interesting. They’ve done overhauls that dramatic in the past in expansions, but the current roadmap has nothing that large in the next year. I do think that there’s promise here and that 2K isn’t going to let the game just die, but the game as-is is not particularly good and there’s no guarantee that Firaxis will get it right even if they do keep trying. I hope they do and I’ll update this review if and when it’s a more worthwhile experience. Time will tell.
Rating: 60%
Price: $70
Time to beat: 12-15 hours for a standard speed game
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