 Review By: Nick Arvites |
Developer: | Firaxis Games |
| Publisher: | 2K Games | |
| Genre: | Strategy | |
| ESRB: | Everyone 10+ | |
| # Of Players: | 1-4 | |
| Online Play: | Yes | |
| Accessories: | Xbox Live (online play) |
Civilization: Revolution tends to have quicker games than its PC counterparts. While I would routinely run Civilization IV games that could last for days, I rarely had a Civilization: Revolution game last more than a few hours. The focus appears to be full games in one sitting, and this approach is great for the console market. This focus explains the stripped down version of Civilization seen here. Faster production and research times allows you to advance quicker. The game ends with four victory conditions: domination, cultural, economic, or technological. Domination occurs when you capture every enemy capital city. You don’t need to control every city, just the capitals. This changes military strategy if you’re seeking domination, since you only really need to get once city per civilization. Cultural victory occurs if you build the United Nations. Economic victory requires the World Bank. Technological victory is triggered when you reach Alpha Centauri. During gameplay, I found it easier to get to Cultural or Economic victory than military or science. Those two conditions were often met when I was seeking other goals (military or scientific). Military victory sounds like it would be simple, but you often find your AI and human opponents overloading their capital city with defenders while relatively ignoring their other cities. Scientific victory is often a footrace up the tech tree, and you often find some AI opponent being constantly one step ahead of your pursuits. In open games, I rarely had any domination or scientific victories, whereas I was always deciding if I should win by either culture or economics. Once you get close to a victory condition, the remaining civilizations will likely declare war on you in order to prevent you from obtaining victory. While in many cases, this is not enough to stop you, it can prolong the game by several turns if they can immediately disrupt your civilization. Odds are, however, they’re making a futile effort and won’t get to your cities on time.
There seems to be more of a military emphasis in Civilization Revolution. Since the entire system is streamlined, it is much easier to build an effective military than in prior versions of Civilization. Forming armies (linking three units together) becomes the standard, which makes single units by themselves relatively useless. In prior Civilization games, I would often go ages until actually getting into a conflict. In Civilization Revolution, I found myself in conflict far more frequently. This is a good changeup, but will disappoint anyone who tries to take a more subtle path to victory. Constant conflict does keep the game pace moving, and can weed out weaker players quickly. The map sizes also contribute to the pacing, since maps are smaller and resources are fewer. The nuclear option really isn’t one, as there is a limit to nuclear weapons. Only the civ that builds the Manhattan Project gets an ICBM, and they only get one ICBM at that. Gone are the mutual destruction wars between two nuclear powers. Often, I found myself getting the tech and only using it to snuff out a well-defended capital.
The AI is much more forgiving in Civilization Revolution than it has been in past iterations. In prior Civilization titles, I could rarely drop in and hold my own on the higher difficulty settings. In Civilization Revolution, I found that I could consistently hold my own with the AI on the highest difficulty setting. While they would generally out-research me by one or two techs, I could often keep up and defend against their attacks. This is probably due to the slimmed down game, mainly since there are fewer places that the AI can “cheat” while managing its civilization.
Diplomacy is stripped down to bare essentials. You can trade techs, enter into trade agreements, and demand things from other civilizations. However, there are no right-of-passage agreements in alliances. This led to stupid results, where an ally could not push troops through my territory to attack a mutual enemy. This just seemed like something that shouldn’t have been taken out. I understand trying to keep diplomacy simple (and the Civs here are nowhere near as demanding as their PC counterparts), but the entire concept of military alliances are essentially destroyed if your allies cannot move troops through your territory.
Governments are also stripped down to their bare essentials. They give you one positive boost and usually a negative boost. For example, Democracy gives you increased trade production, but you cannot initiate wars and must accept any peace offer presented. This ultimately makes Democracy useless, since you have no bargaining posture and you cannot ultimately push war. This is also unrealistic, as Democracies have often declared war and refused peace treaties throughout history. Simplifying the governmental forms makes them almost a non-issue, and you find that people rarely play as Democratic (bad foreign policy options) or Fundamentalist (no science boosts) governments in favor of penalty-free choices like Monarchy and Republics.
You can go online and play with 2-4 other players over Xbox Live. This mode mixes humans with AIs, and you can have teams or free-for-alls. The game provides ranked and unranked options. Getting a game together was relatively easy, although I had much better experiences playing people I knew from my friends list as they were less likely to drop (this is standard among all games though).
Bottom Line:
Civilization Revolution is a good way to bring over the overarching concepts of the Civilization series to an audience that may have been turned off by the depth and complexity of the series. The stripped down interface has its highs (no workers) and lows (foreign policy, governments), and I suspect we’ll likely see some of these changes ported over to future Civilization titles. Fans of the PC series may be turned off by the simplistic and bare-bones style, whereas newcomers will likely enjoy this title. By keeping it simple and designing the game around a quick-fix notion, Firaxis has successfully introduced the Civilization series to a console audience.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 8.5 |
Posted: 2009-01-06 21:41:16 PST