Seeing how I got Facebook at the beginning of the year I’m not exactly deep in the casual Facebook game scene. I’ve seen others playing games like Farmville but I never had an interest in it, so much that I have never tried it. That said I’m also not a big Civilization fan, to be honest the only experience I’ve had with Civ was the coverage on Giant Bomb and Civilization Revolution on iOS.

Even with both of those against it I had an interest in CivWorld. I’ve always wanted a MMO-RTS hybrid with the long persistence of an Age of Empires title (which I hope Age of Empires Online will fill) so when CivWorld was released (launched?) I wanted to check it out.

First of all I must point out in CivWorld is that the start of the game is extremely slow. Like ‘continental shift’ slow. In your first hour with the game you’ll achieve almost nothing. In one hour of playtime (which includes a 6 hour gap in between) I manage to create 3 units. That’s right, 3 units in ONE HOUR. In the time it takes you to have a decent game of Civ 5 you’ll have 3 units in CivWorld. This leaves a MASSIVE barrier of entry to any new players with a casual interest. This is mainly because of the resource gathering and how it’s used. Unlike games of the genre food isn’t a commodity, it’s a level. To create units you don’t spend 300 food and have it taken away, no you have to get up to a certain amount of food and each time you want another unit you have to get up to the next level. For example to get one unit you must get 300 food and then after that you’ll need to get 800 food and it goes on and on and on.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the resource gathering itself wasn’t as slow as the rest of the game. The way resources are gathered isn’t as far-fetched as the unit creation but it’s still extremely slow. The Units you DO have are walking between their house, location of resource (farm, trees, rocks) and a drop off point in your town centre. Problem is that the resource they do gather is usually between 1 -3 and with goals in the hundreds and thousands it’s a process that takes a lot of time. Also in a bizarre choice another way to gather resources is a series of mini-games. These mini-games seems like your typing casual games, puzzles, mazes etc but the thing that will catch you off guard is that ‘moves’ are used when interacting with the puzzle. Moving a puzzle piece, twisting a path, passing through a maze all costs ‘moves’ and these ‘moves’ are limited. This stops people from grinding out resources which begs the question of why give me the option to do mini-games for resources when I can only play when certain conditions are met?

Unfortunately that’s as close as CivWorld get’s to being an actual ‘game’. Unlike past Civ games you have no direct control of your units. All you can do tell them what resource to gather and when you units collect resources using an inefficient path this only makes you wish you were playing Civ 5. That’s the less of CivWorld’s problems when it comes to interaction with the game. I’m currently playing on Firefox 5 with an uncluttered toolbar, even with that the Flash window CivWorld presents itself with is too tall for the default window of Firefox. The only way you can see the game window in its entirety is to go full screen, which personally for me sucks because I like to multitask, between iTunes, other tabs and other programs going from thing to thing in full screen Firefox is incredibly annoying. This wouldn’t be such a deal-breaker if your main controls weren’t on the top and bottom of the window.

My next point is being brought up with my lack knowledge on how other ‘Social-Casual games’ do this but it must be addressed. Micro transactions. In almost every subscreen of the game is an option to buy ‘CivBucks’. What are these ‘CivBucks’ you may ask? It’s basically Microsoft points for CivWorld. You buy CivBucks to buy resources, units and items for your throne room. Now I’m all for micro transactions. If buying your way through game makes part of the audience happy it’s good for both the player and the developer. But unlike Team Fortress 2, CivWorld tries to make sure that you are reminded every time you open a new screen to buy CivBucks to improve your Civilization. It’s really shows the money hungry nature of the casual games market and it's really blatant. Also it has a stupid name. CivBucks? Really?

Again, I’ve played CivWorld for an hour. I haven’t even touched combat or research or interaction with other players but so far from what I see and what I’ve played, CivWorld isn’t lookng so hot.