Civilization 7 is by no means a bad game. I open with that to acknowledge its competence, and to damn it. Civ is the archetypal 4X, and in some senses, Civ 7 remains a standard-bearer. It’s better, in a general sort of way, than most recent attempts to unseat or deconstruct it. There’s lots going on, production values are high, and it innovates with a new structure and revamped diplomacy, city expansion, and more.
Civilization 7 reviewDeveloper: Firaxis GamesPublisher: 2KPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out on 11th February on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch
But it’s . Even some of its most flawed challengers are far more interesting. At times, when I hit a stretch of “just one more turn!” it felt less like an in-joke than a curse.
The most immediate changes are to the formula of “take a historical culture from an ancient village to modern world domination” itself. Your choice of leader is now untethered from their historical place. A full game is divided into three ages that require you to choose a new culture (with bonuses less numerical and more specific than in Humankind). Each age partly resets foreign relations, trade, reserves, and building effects. They downgrade cities into towns, themselves a new feature: newly founded settlements can only buy (not build) a limited set of buildings, but grow faster, and can halt that growth to become specialised tributaries instead of cities.
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The intent is, I think, to break away from slogging through 6,000 years of one path, of warring forever against that one rival, and to allow adaptation and experimentation. The first two ages close with escalating crises that force you to choose negative modifiers (evil doppelgangers of social policies, which are unlocked with culture instead of science) until the act break. It’s a move towards narrative – an unpredictable challenge to make the game – and you – less rote. In practice, they’re either irrelevant or deeply irritating.
Picture a Civ where you’re suddenly told everyone’s unhappy for no reason. You can influence where the damage falls somewhat, but unless you knew in advance, chances are you didn’t focus on getting everyone’s happiness above 12-18, considering there’s little benefit to being above 1. Excess pools into an empire-wide “celebration”: several turns of whichever dull bonus your otherwise irrelevant government type provides.