Civilization Revolution - 6/10

As a child in high school, I have memories of playing civilization after school. Saved on floppy disk and carried over weeks of conflicts into our cyber world of domination.

These days, we have advanced miniature mainframe consoles in our lounge room most likely capable of calculating doomsday. That being said, an emulation of it is just as extremely cool. The idea of conquering the world from my TV, advancing my civilization into the modern age and sending tanks at a bunch of roman legions holds great premise to me.

Civ:Rev plays the same as all of its predecessors. You start off in early ad or late bc, build towns, make peace/war with the goal of being a stronger nation in on way or another then all the other guys.

The I had with this game was that, compared to its predecessors, it had very little scope in which I could choose my relations with other countries. It basically comes down to: make peace, make war, ask x to make war with y. Yes you can sell your technologies (before all nations turn hostile), and even buy other nations technologies. But you cannot make the same demands other npc races make asking for your most advanced technology in return for 2 turns of peace. Occasionally when you decline a peace offer a nation will offer you a pitiful sum of coin which is laughable due to by the time this happens your so far technologically advanced, their presence, in the real world would benefit yours, allowing scientists to study people from past millenias.

But not too many millenias as the game only boasts very little actual time periods. IE, there isn't that much of a gap between muskets and tanks. To make up for this, I must say the defensive units are VERY defensive. I witnessed medieval archers destroy a TANK.

But its not all bad. In fact this game has gone the direction I wanted it to take. I wanted a simplified civ game. Imagine civilization as a long fingernail. Not too long, but long enough to be cut. Now imagine you accidentally cut too much off. The same way you might gain pain from this experience is the same way you might gain pain from this game if you were a past civ fan. That being said I recommend this game to anyone who hasn't played a civ game before. You will not be overwhelmed with choice as you would have if you played an earlier civ game.

While the gameplay still remained enjoyable, I started to feel like I was playing one of the many other turn based rts that plague the gaming market these days (think of around 50% of all psp titles). The one thing that set this game apart was the extremely odd and frustrating controls which IMO can GTFO. The fact, I must use my left control stick to move a cursor, press x to select a unit, use my right control stick to plan a route, press x again to execute the action, then use my left control stick to regain control of my cursor, move away from my next minion demanding instructions in life and choose the next unit I want to command before re-iterating is BLOODY ANNOYING.

That being said, its tolerable until you gain a large percentage of the map where the game insists on moving you to the city/unit demanding instruction in no sensible order every ****ING TIME you instruct your previous miserable, gibberish talking twit. And yes, npcs refuse to speak english to you. Instead they all speak exactly the same giberrish in different accents while text interpretations on the screen direct your knowledge. While this feature was used in a past game of awesomeness (banjo kazooie), it was to save space. With the blue ray holding 50 ****ING GIGABYTES, its hard to think devs needed to save that extra space for another low poly 3d (yet effective) model.

I did like this game though. It might be the fact I'm a nerd who got excited at 3d chess on the n64 but to all those who have enjoyed civilization in its past iterations, I warn you of this game. For those who hated the last iterations, I actually recommend it, Its much simpler and more relaxed. To finish it off, I won't be utilizing the EB 7 day return policy.


- Blu3man

Submitted by blu3man 26/07/2008 77 8

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