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IGN Review of Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution
Traditionally, playing a game of Civilization has been a bit like falling in love. You start out with a few tentative moves, and a week later you're up to your elbows in trebuchets. And, like amore, the Civ series is famous for its complexity, ruthless double-dealing and potential for long, drawn-out conflict.
Consequently, the series has never translated all that well to consoles, where most gamers favor quick bursts of entertainment, as opposed to multi-day matches with hundreds of constantly shifting variables. Bringing a quality Civ experience from the office chair to the living room couch is a challenge worthy of series creator Sid Meier's attention, and his focus shows in the franchise's latest incarnation – Civilization Revolution.
For those who've never played a Civilization, a brief introduction. The Civ titles are turn-based strategy games in which the player chooses a culture (say, the Aztecs) and starts out with a single tiny village, growing along the way in an attempt to reach world dominance. Moving up in the world results in the growth of cities, development of new technologies and often quite a bit of military maneuvering. Play your cards right and you'll go from scratching at the dirt with sticks to launching rockets into space, usually after hours and hours of micromanagement
But Civ Rev is not just a straight port of prior Civilization games. Rather, it is a ground-up rebuild of the basic Civ idea, crafted with consoles in mind. Attention has been carefully paid to pacing, ease of use, and fun, and developer Firaxis has shied away from some of the heavy lifting required of PC Civ players. The result is a stripped-down turn-based strategy game that serves as both a great introduction to the genre for the uninitiated and a satisfying console experience for practiced PC players who want a (relatively) quick console fix.
Pick-up-and-play seems to be the mantra Firaxis followed with Civ Rev. There are 16 civilizations to choose from at the beginning of any match, and each have unique abilities and era bonuses, which are special attributes that kick in as the match unfolds over time. Egyptians, for example, will gain +1 movement for Rifleman once they reach the Industrial Era. There are a lot of touches like these in Civ Rev that reward you for staying in the game without forcing you to micromanage every stat and attribute.
You could fill the Great Library at Alexandria with the differences between Civ Rev and its PC counterparts, so I won't detail them all here. But there are some important departures that merit mentioning. First, Civilization Revolution games are typically much shorter than PC Civ games. Most can be finished in a couple hours, depending on difficulty settings (there are four), experience level and whether you are playing against computer or human opponents. Also, maps are preset and randomized, which means you have no control over how the land looks or how big the playfield is. And the entire experience has been stripped of much of the complexity that may turn off some gamers – your population won't die of starvation, city management is more hands-off and there are fewer conditions for victory.
Despite that, there is serious strategy at play in Civ Rev. There are four ways to win the game – Domination, Technology, Economic and Cultural – each adapted to different play styles. If you enjoy building vast armies and rolling over your neighbors, you'll find plenty of joy pursuing Domination victories in Civ Rev. Each civ has unique fighting units, which helps keep the single-player mode entertaining even after a handful of wins. Joining three units together at the touch of a button creates an army, which receives status upgrades as it wins victories. Destroying an enemy city with a Ninja Catapult Army is right up there among the best feelings in gaming.
If you plan to make a pass at the other methods of victory, you'll want to master the technology tree and the diplomacy screen. The first is your ticket to progress, and the second is the key to keeping your ambitious neighbors at bay until you reach the Space Age and launch a ship to Alpha Centauri; earn 20,000 gold and build the World Bank; or win a cultural victory by amassing a combination of 20 wonders, great people and converted cities. It's always a treat to see Gandhi pop up on screen and threaten you with total annihilation, and it's even better to realize that he can usually be bribed for the price of a government secret or two.
The diplomacy screen, like most useful functions in Civ Rev, can be accessed with a single button press, and it's not only key in the single-player mode. Multiplayer is a hugely important part of the Civilization experience, and it's implemented well in Civ Rev. Up to four players can join up to play online, either in a team match or a free-for-all. The game automatically adds AI players if necessary, even if a human player drops out mid-match.
Barring few initial hiccups getting connected during our tests, we found Civ Rev online to be lag-free and smooth. Voice chat is fully supported, and there's even a handy private chat function that can be implemented directly from the diplomacy screen. So if you're in an online match and are being harried by a pesky friend, just open a chatline with a mutual enemy and play them against one another. Oh, the possibilities.
Civilization Revolution is a standout strategy console game that successfully straddles the line between hardcore and casual. But after spending many hours with the game, I found myself wanting just a bit more depth, which I suppose is the inherent pitfall of bringing one of PC gaming's deepest experiences to a console with both input and hardware limitations. True, I could get in and out of a game with relative ease, but I also didn't have the option to micromanage my workers (there are production settings, but they are quite basic) or embark on an epic campaign. And although the randomly-generated maps are a cool idea and solve some strategic problems, the result is that no location looks truly unique, and I found the maps to be a bit stale and repetitive after multiple rounds.
There are two single-player modes – a basic one in which you choose a civ and battle AI players, and a Scenario mode that spices things up a bit. There are a litany of different Scenarios included (and more to come via DLC), each with different parameters. One makes Barbarians insanely strong, another makes tech advance far more rapidly, etc. These increase replayability a great deal, but they do feel like more of the same with slight tweaks.
By its very nature, Civ Rev is a shallower strategy experience than its PC counterparts, and that's not a negative overall. In fact, because it caters directly to its platform rather than trying to shoehorn an unwieldy PC port into a console, it succeeds where others have failed. And despite its limits, Civ Rev has all the polish and character you'd expect.
The advisors and leaders who pop up on your screen are well-done and creative, even down to their Simlish-like pidgin dubbed "Firaxlish" by the developers. However, their presence on-screen can sometimes lead to some slight slowdown in the game, which I never found seriously affected gameplay but was noticeable nonetheless.
©2008-07-02, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Consequently, the series has never translated all that well to consoles, where most gamers favor quick bursts of entertainment, as opposed to multi-day matches with hundreds of constantly shifting variables. Bringing a quality Civ experience from the office chair to the living room couch is a challenge worthy of series creator Sid Meier's attention, and his focus shows in the franchise's latest incarnation – Civilization Revolution.
For those who've never played a Civilization, a brief introduction. The Civ titles are turn-based strategy games in which the player chooses a culture (say, the Aztecs) and starts out with a single tiny village, growing along the way in an attempt to reach world dominance. Moving up in the world results in the growth of cities, development of new technologies and often quite a bit of military maneuvering. Play your cards right and you'll go from scratching at the dirt with sticks to launching rockets into space, usually after hours and hours of micromanagement
But Civ Rev is not just a straight port of prior Civilization games. Rather, it is a ground-up rebuild of the basic Civ idea, crafted with consoles in mind. Attention has been carefully paid to pacing, ease of use, and fun, and developer Firaxis has shied away from some of the heavy lifting required of PC Civ players. The result is a stripped-down turn-based strategy game that serves as both a great introduction to the genre for the uninitiated and a satisfying console experience for practiced PC players who want a (relatively) quick console fix.
Pick-up-and-play seems to be the mantra Firaxis followed with Civ Rev. There are 16 civilizations to choose from at the beginning of any match, and each have unique abilities and era bonuses, which are special attributes that kick in as the match unfolds over time. Egyptians, for example, will gain +1 movement for Rifleman once they reach the Industrial Era. There are a lot of touches like these in Civ Rev that reward you for staying in the game without forcing you to micromanage every stat and attribute.
You could fill the Great Library at Alexandria with the differences between Civ Rev and its PC counterparts, so I won't detail them all here. But there are some important departures that merit mentioning. First, Civilization Revolution games are typically much shorter than PC Civ games. Most can be finished in a couple hours, depending on difficulty settings (there are four), experience level and whether you are playing against computer or human opponents. Also, maps are preset and randomized, which means you have no control over how the land looks or how big the playfield is. And the entire experience has been stripped of much of the complexity that may turn off some gamers – your population won't die of starvation, city management is more hands-off and there are fewer conditions for victory.
Despite that, there is serious strategy at play in Civ Rev. There are four ways to win the game – Domination, Technology, Economic and Cultural – each adapted to different play styles. If you enjoy building vast armies and rolling over your neighbors, you'll find plenty of joy pursuing Domination victories in Civ Rev. Each civ has unique fighting units, which helps keep the single-player mode entertaining even after a handful of wins. Joining three units together at the touch of a button creates an army, which receives status upgrades as it wins victories. Destroying an enemy city with a Ninja Catapult Army is right up there among the best feelings in gaming.
If you plan to make a pass at the other methods of victory, you'll want to master the technology tree and the diplomacy screen. The first is your ticket to progress, and the second is the key to keeping your ambitious neighbors at bay until you reach the Space Age and launch a ship to Alpha Centauri; earn 20,000 gold and build the World Bank; or win a cultural victory by amassing a combination of 20 wonders, great people and converted cities. It's always a treat to see Gandhi pop up on screen and threaten you with total annihilation, and it's even better to realize that he can usually be bribed for the price of a government secret or two.
The diplomacy screen, like most useful functions in Civ Rev, can be accessed with a single button press, and it's not only key in the single-player mode. Multiplayer is a hugely important part of the Civilization experience, and it's implemented well in Civ Rev. Up to four players can join up to play online, either in a team match or a free-for-all. The game automatically adds AI players if necessary, even if a human player drops out mid-match.
Barring few initial hiccups getting connected during our tests, we found Civ Rev online to be lag-free and smooth. Voice chat is fully supported, and there's even a handy private chat function that can be implemented directly from the diplomacy screen. So if you're in an online match and are being harried by a pesky friend, just open a chatline with a mutual enemy and play them against one another. Oh, the possibilities.
Civilization Revolution is a standout strategy console game that successfully straddles the line between hardcore and casual. But after spending many hours with the game, I found myself wanting just a bit more depth, which I suppose is the inherent pitfall of bringing one of PC gaming's deepest experiences to a console with both input and hardware limitations. True, I could get in and out of a game with relative ease, but I also didn't have the option to micromanage my workers (there are production settings, but they are quite basic) or embark on an epic campaign. And although the randomly-generated maps are a cool idea and solve some strategic problems, the result is that no location looks truly unique, and I found the maps to be a bit stale and repetitive after multiple rounds.
There are two single-player modes – a basic one in which you choose a civ and battle AI players, and a Scenario mode that spices things up a bit. There are a litany of different Scenarios included (and more to come via DLC), each with different parameters. One makes Barbarians insanely strong, another makes tech advance far more rapidly, etc. These increase replayability a great deal, but they do feel like more of the same with slight tweaks.
By its very nature, Civ Rev is a shallower strategy experience than its PC counterparts, and that's not a negative overall. In fact, because it caters directly to its platform rather than trying to shoehorn an unwieldy PC port into a console, it succeeds where others have failed. And despite its limits, Civ Rev has all the polish and character you'd expect.
The advisors and leaders who pop up on your screen are well-done and creative, even down to their Simlish-like pidgin dubbed "Firaxlish" by the developers. However, their presence on-screen can sometimes lead to some slight slowdown in the game, which I never found seriously affected gameplay but was noticeable nonetheless.
©2008-07-02, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved