Restrictive but Fun
Civilization Revolution is like going to your favorite restaurant and ordering your favorite dish only to have the waiter hand you 1/2 of your order and walk away.
Civ Rev is a good game, especially for console owners who haven't had the pleasure of playing Civilization IV or any of the expansions but to those who have experienced what the PC games were like, Civ Rev will feel stripped and might have you jump back on your PC to satisfy your craving for world conquest. The game does feel tailored for consoles and doesn't feel like a bad port, but they did remove some key diplomatic features of the game like forming alliances and non-agression pacts, etc. and pretty much streamlined the gameplay to allow for quicker and hassle-free matches. You can no longer directly control workers, however you can still dictate the production of a particular city's resources, so you can opt for gold instead of production or leave it balanced at default, etc.
Much of the core gameplay was left intact. You still have your tech trees that you need to progress through and building cities still rely on picking out a good location. The maps are always randomly generated which helps to keep things fresh through each playthrough but you can't pick the diverse settings of how the world will be shaped as like in the PC version. After a handful of matches, you'll start to notice that the world is generally broken into small-sized continents which can sometimes be too small for two or more civilizations to grow properly without fighting.
The A.I. can be a tough opponent but after awhile you'll start to notice that most, if not all, are overly aggressive. Things might be peaceful for the first part of the game and then out of nowhere a civilization will demand almost all of your gold or a certain tech in exchange for x number of turns of peace. It's like having a peace treaty but before the war, so it doesn't really make sense and knowing how many turns you have left of peaceful conditions kinda ruins any peaceful intentions without feeling like being pushed around. Anyway, this type of gameplay was fun at first but it got annoying later on since all I was doing was defending / attacking other nations about 1/3 into the game.
The multiplayer experience can be more of a challenge, like most games, and is built really well. The built-in VOIP lets you smack-talk, negotiate, smack-talk, plead for peace, smack-talk, talk behind someone's back, etc. which is a cool feature to have for a Civ game. The matches can be fairly long however, but if a player leaves the AI will just take over until the game is finished.
Graphics are from the Civ IV engine but they still look good on the big screen. Sound and music are nothing to brag about but they serve their purpose. Animations are done fairly well and the engagements are always fun to watch thanks to the updated fight animations where each unit will scatter across the tile as they fight the enemy.
Overall - This game is a nice breath of fresh air in the console market but if you're looking for a more complete, polished, and deeper version of the game do yourself a favor and pickup the PC version already.
