Civilization 7 has managed to split its fan base directly down the middle.
If you’ve not played a Civ game before, chances are that a turn-based strategy game is down your alley, you’ll have a grand time. If you’ve played Civ before, be that for many years, or just the last few installments, you may find yourself at a bit of a crossroads like myself.
The Civ Formula
To really simplify how a Civ game works, you choose an empire. You start with nothing, and the perfect game is paced just right, so that your empire either grows from strength to strength, turn by turn, and you’re considering yourself the next strategic genius to grace the face of the Earth, or you find yourself facing a nuclear threat from Napoleon because you’ve made a string of bad decisions and really, you’re just done for.
Either way, it’s pretty easy to lose hours of your life to a Civ session.
When it’s seamless, time stops for no man, and the hope is that even if you decide to bomb Spain when their influence way outranks yours, if you’re really clever about it, you may just come back from it.
Read our previous Civilization reviews:
Civilization VI PC Review | Civilization VI Console Review | Civilization VI: Gathering Storm Review
Visuals and Gameplay
In terms of looks, Civilization 7 is stunning. The map feels alive as you uncover it, like finding an ocean tile with some whales in it as you explore the shore. Of course, the soundtrack is beautiful and immersive.
Monuments and wonders are beautifully brought to life. Importantly, the foundations of a Civilization game are there, and that will always draw crowds. The AI turns are quicker than ever, and overall the gameplay feels sleek, if a bit overshadowed by an awful UI.
Where It Falls Apart
The thing is, after about 20 hours, it starts to play badly. 20 hours is a drop in the ocean of how much time one can spend in a Civ game. For me, it started to go wrong with the ages system.
Historically you would choose one civilization for the duration of your game and watch how your version of history unfolded.
The problem was that if early events went your way (or other civilizations) this could set the tone for the rest of the game, taking away some interest in playing a game from start to end. To combat this, the ages system was introduced in Civilization 7, and it seems to have achieved just the opposite.
Basically, as you move from one age to the next, you can change your civilization. If you’ve just spent many hours playing as Rome and then move on to the next age, you are given choices to play as other civilizations like Spain. The civilizations you are offered match up to choices you have made in the previous age, which is the game’s attempt to allow some continuity.
Personally, I want to grow my empire from age to age. Moving from one age to the next almost made me want to stop playing, because I felt as if each age were its own self-contained game, and not one continuation of a great empire. Even having to consider the question and overall strategy behind changing civilizations was hugely jarring for me.
Frustrations
Add this to a poorly designed UI, some strangely laid out and barely explained legacy paths (basically winning conditions), and civics trees which make research and civil progress feel irrelevant, and almost negligible “actions have consequences” mechanics, and you end up with a boring game that will keep new players entertained for 30 hours, and infuriate long-time fans who find the whole gameplay loop stunted.
Final Verdict
This isn’t to say that Civilization 7 is an awful game with no positive outlook, but it is another game to add to the list of “released half-baked.” Some patches are already out, and the developers are actively responding to community feedback, so we will likely see improvements to the game every month, slowly making it more and more palatable to fans (think Diablo III).
I do think that by the time Civilization 7 gets to a point of being able to keep people playing for hundreds of hours though, a lot of people, especially those new to the genre, would have moved on.