Sid Meier's Civilidon'thaveanymorefreetimebecauseofthisgame
The Civilization franchise has been a mainstay of PC gaming since I was a child. Even though I never tried a Civ game until Civilization 4, I always had a deep respect and fear of the series. So when I first tried my hand at Civ 4 I was almost immediately overwhelmed and frustrated by the games vast amount of options and lack of instruction. So I tried Civ Revolution when that came out, but it felt too dumbed down from what the previous game had. Civilization V fixes all the problems I’ve had from the previous games in the series.
I’m not going to explain all the ways you can play and win in this game, otherwise this review would be 10 pages long. Most of the core gameplay aspects are very much the same. You start as a small settlement in the Stone Age and eventually work yourself into a vast empire with future technology. You can win by military, cultural, diplomatic, or technological means.
There is a lot I can say about this game, but the best thing I can think of is that you are never confused or overwhelmed about anything. At every point in the game when you encounter something new, one of your four AI advisers will pop onto screen with a small amount of text that will guide you through. Not sure which unit you should build? Each of your advisers will have a suggestion for you. The AIs are also very non-intrusive, this is not a case of “if I don’t do what the advisers say then I’m going to fail.” In fact, very rarely did I ever build the units they wanted me to, not because it was a bad choice, but because it didn’t fit into my current strategy.
A new inclusion to the series are city states. These are single city civilizations that aren’t competing to win the game. You can gift them units and use money to buy their friendship or you can complete quests that they give you to boost their alliance with you. If you become ally’s with them, they will offer you various bonuses based off of what personality they have. A militaristic city state will reward you with the occasional advanced combat unit, while other states may offer you cultural or food bonuses. If you’re on the war path then you can you can of course just treat them just like any other player and take them over or just burn their city to the ground.
Just because this game is much easier to get into then other civ games doesn’t mean it has less options. Far from it. If you’re into micro-managing each tile that your citizens work and if you love telling each worker exactly when and where to build roads, farms, and mines then by all means go for it! But if you just want to focus of the big decisions (e.g. Who to invade, what units or building to create, what technologies to research, who to trade with) all you have to do is set your workers to “automate” and they will build whatever the game thinks is best.
There is one thing that you should know before you pick this up. This is a hateful hateful game. Civilization V hates your friends, it hates your family, and it especially hates your sleep! My very first game of Civ V, the one where I played on easy and steam rolled everyone on the map, took me 9 hours to complete… Yeah. Nine freakin’ hours. This is on the standard game speed. You can make the game speed much quicker if you want to get through a match in under a day, but that’s not how this game wants you to play, it wants to suck up all your time, it wants you to forget about eating, it wants you to keep thinking “just one more turn” until you see sunlight from outside your windows and realize you’ve been playing all night.
That last paragraph is not a knock against Civ 5, it is just a little warning to anyone who picks this game up that you are going to be sucked in. Civilization V is flat out one of the best games I have played all year. With its endless customizability, ease of entry, support for mod tools, multiplayer, epic sized matches, and even steamworks and cloud saving, there is no way I could recommend this game higher.
