Civilization Revolution
When it was announced that Firaxis was going to make a console version of Civilization I was skeptical to say the least. Civilization and other 4X games (which stands for "explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate" a term coined by Alan Emrich during his Masters of Orion preview for any game in the vein of Civilization) have always seemed too large in scope and too dependent on keyboard and mouse to ever make that leap. I was wrong, I’m happy to report, but I was not entirely wrong either, sadly.
Civilization Revolution has however taken a step in a direction that I’m sure hardcore Civilization fans will abhor; everything is made smaller, simpler and shorter. The tech tree is less than half the length of a proper Civilization game, there is no land improvement or workers and the diplomacy is limited to whatever the computer has preselected for you to use as bargaining chips. However, this game is not made for those fans so this aspect does not have an impact on the review; I’m just letting those fans know.
This isn’t to say that Civilization Revolution is a bad game; it just feels as if they have distilled what a Civ game is down to a point that it’s actually no longer really a Civilization game; it’s almost a caricature of a Civilization game.
The leap from computer didn’t just have issues in those areas either, there is no function al zoom and what is in the game does little more then make you wish you had a functional zoom. So to get from one side of the planet to the other you’re left slowly scrolling from point to point. Its mind numbing at its best, soul killing at its worst and if you add in the lack of ability to simply select units, and instead having to either arrow through them one at a time, or scroll to the m across the globe, you start to get the jist for what happens if you make a globe spanning empire and the tedium you will encounter.
Furthermore t he other civilizations seem to have a trigger that says when the human player gets to certain point towards winning, start making ridiculous demands of them and then declare war on them when they refuse. You can make them love you, if you get close to winning expect to be attacked by them. It’s so blatantly obvious this is what’s happening that it almost kills the game.
Finally, on Deity difficulty (the highest) there are times when it is almost obvious that the computer cheats to beat you. I say almost because there is enough doubt for the jury to not convict. The number of times that I was three to four technologies ahead of the next closest civilization only to have them beat me technologically when I was one tech from winning was at twenty three before I stopped counting. This is across all victory conditions (except Domination for obvious reason) and can… be frustrating to say the least.
Civilization Revolution is just enough Civilization to trick your brain into being satisfied by playing it and if you are simply looking for a Civilization game that only lasts about an hour and gets that monkey off your back one more time this is your game. However if you spend a longer amount of time with this game or delve deeper into its strategy, you will find it lacking in some pretty key ways.
