Tag Archives: Firaxis

Civilization V: Gods & Kings Review

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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.

Civilization V Review–A Lot Like An Old Friend Who Can’t Remember Your Name

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I’ve been a big fan of the Civilization PC game series since the very first one came out. Sid Meier is considered one of the gods of computer gaming, and there’s a good reason for it. He completely understood what gamers like, and he brought that experience to each and every one of us who paid money to pay that series of games.

Civilization I was a great game that introduced us to the idea that you could make a great board game into a wonderful computer game. It literally invented the term “just one more move” for gamers who realized it was getting late, and they had to stop or they’d never get any sleep.

Civilization II pretty much redesigned the game from scratch and realized that there was no way it could just rest on its laurels. It had to do much more, and it did. Most gamers who are familiar with the series will argue that this was the zenith of the series, and the game just didn’t get any better.

Civilization III didn’t do a lot for me. It was okay, but I still loved Civilization II.

Civilization IV was the real successor to Civilization II. It really enhanced the graphics engine, and when they released the expansion pack, Beyond the Sword, the game was just amazing.

And then they released Civilization V. I’ve played it now for a few days, and I have to say that it’s obvious that it’s a sequel, but at the same time it’s also somewhat obvious that the designers of this game were not the designers of the previous games. Or they are, but they all had Alzheimer’s while designing it (apologizes to anyone who suffers from, or knows anyone suffering from, Alzheimer’s) because it’s like they forgot some of the elements that made the originals so great. They really dummied the game, and I couldn’t believe they did it. It’s like somewhere down the line some executive at Firaxis decided that they had to appeal to the console crowd with the new game. They weren’t happy being one of the greatest selling game franchises ever; they wanted to do so much more. And they did it by doing so much less.

There are so many places in the game where I found myself thinking, why would you do this? When I was having conversations with world leaders, I kind of expected that there would at least be a tool tip or something explaining to me what the hell a Treaty of Secrecy might mean before I had to decide yes or no whether or not to grant one. Civ IV did that. But not Civ V. Instead, you make a blind choice and then look it up on the Civilopedia, where all the information is contained, and suprisingly, it’s extremely vague. It’s like they had Todd, the guy who goes to get sodas for the group when they’re busy making the game, decide on what to put in the game information and then they forgot to let him play the game first to at least be able to fill in some of that information.

The whole game feels that way sometimes. And some of the bigger issues that happened in the earlier games are just glossed over. Religion is not an issue any more. Most stuff is gone. Now, you just gather up culture, like you’d gather health ups in a first person shooter, except they just kind of gather on their own over time. Yeah, it’s really dummied down.

The game is somewhat okay, but there are no real ways to customize a game. The interface for customization appears almost as if they decided to release the game and then fill it in later. There is also no way to design the world, like the famous World Builder in Civ IV. The fans on the message boards say that Firaxis is going to release that at a later date. That’s really ominous, the kind of thing I’d expect from a money grubbing company like EA, rather than Firaxis.

The game’s okay, and wonderful if you’ve never played a Civilization game before, but I’m somewhat underwhelmed. I’m sure the patches and addons will add more, but honestly, we’re purchasing a game on the assumption that the designers and the game community will fill in the blanks. That’s a horrible situation to be in, and I’m very disappointed in the whole Sid Meier franchise. I used to believe they were a lot like Blizzard and Bioware, in that they could do no wrong.

I hate to be proven wrong.