Civilization V: Gods & Kings Review

The expansion for Civilization V arrived a few weeks ago, and like any Civilization-obsessed geek, I had to go out and buy it. I should put forth a disclaimer right off the start: I was not a major fan of Civilization V when it released. There were a couple of problems inherent in that game, such as it required better graphics capabilities than I had when I first bought it, it dumbed down Civilization IV to the point that I thought they were just phoning this version in, and it just seemed way too easy for an empire building simulation. The graphics problem I solved by getting a much more powerful machine (it’s amazing how much that solution really solves). The dumbing down really hasn’t gotten that much better, and well, the game being too easy may have finally been addressed by the expansion.

The expansion does make the game a bit more complicated, and it does make it a lot harder to master and win. So both of those are great things.

The expansion brings in one of the left-out features that were present in Civilization IV, and by that I mean religion. Unlike Civ IV, you don’t just choose the name of a known religion and then treat it as some generic religion (in which all religions have the exact same characteristics). In Civ V, when you finally gain enough religion points, you can design your own religion from scratch, adding all sorts of different attributes that will benefit from all sorts of different things happening in the game (like population increases adding more religious points, money, culture, or any other number of possibilities). As you grow the religion, you can add more and more features to it so that it actually does something for your civilization, rather than act as some random number generator that does the same thing for everyone else.

The second thing they added was espionage. I’m still a bit underwhelmed by it, as it doesn’t add a lot of espionage, but a couple of agents that you can control to do espionage or to act as counter-intelligence agents. If you have a large empire, espionage will work against you because there’s little way to protect you against enemy agents when they can strike you at any one of your cities, and you only have enough counterintelligence agents to cover a couple of your cities. Towards the end game, you can build all sorts of counter-espionage elements, like police stations and that kind of thing, but for many years you will be vulnerable and that gets really frustrating when you invested all of your energy into technology and then some stupid country just keeps stealing it all from you, and there’s NOTHING you can do to stop them.

The other additions are new world wonders, new units, and several new empire leaders. Those, as expected, advance the game in numerous ways, and let’s just say that they’re all welcome additions.

For me, the expansion makes the original game a lot more playable than it was when I first bought it. But it still feels like this version of the game was dumbed down more than it ever should have been, and no expansion is really going to fix that. Having said that, it’s still one of the better games out there. And therefore, I give the expansion a 7.0/10.0, whereas the original was only about a 5.5/10.0.