To set the context, I have played every Civilization game since Civilization 1, and most of the offshoots like Colonization, Alpha Centauri, Civilization Revolution and more. I’m a big Civilization fan, so a new Civilization game is a day-1 purchase for me.
My favorite game in the series is Civilization 4. It was the result of continuous improvement from 1, 2, 3 and it had added enough complexity to make every play interesting.
Civilization 7 is a different beast. It’s like they got tired of iterating on the same concept and decided to remake the experience. This game is very different from all other Civilization games and I’m not sure what to think about it.
The main thing they changed is the game is divided into three ages, the Antique, the Middle Ages and Modern Times. Each age has objectives to fulfill in order to end the age. Once you end an age, the new age will begin and for this age lots of things have been reset. The buildings you previously built have become obsolete, the units you had are obsolete. Everyone is back on the same starting point for the new age and given new objectives.
I see why they did this. One of the main problems with previous games is that the start of the game sets the trajectory for the whole play through. If you get a great start, you usually blast through the ages ahead of everyone else. If you get a bad start you will struggle all the way through the game. By resetting the game in the beginning of each age, you break this pattern.
In the same way of balancing the game, they’ve added a limitation on the amount of settlements you may build. In previous games, the focus of early game is always to push out as many cities and claim as much land as possible, because it’s easier to do it by exploration than conquer. In previous games they tried to balance this out by limiting how fast you can produce settlers. This time around there is a hard limit on the number of settlements you can have. I think it started with 5. You can increase this number by researching civics, and this makes it important for an expansive civilization to focus on culture as well. At the end of the game the limitation will be so high you no longer need to care about it, but also all the land has been taken so there is nowhere to create new settlements.
Culture is completely overhauled in this game. In previous games you used culture to expand your borders, as to say you expanded your influence. In this game culture is more like another research path for civics, and civics control the direction of your civilization. You research civics to improve your odds on the battlefield, or to increase your culture, or to improve your finances. It’s like a separate level-up system for your civilization apart from science research. Your borders are instead defined by the growth of your cities. As your cities grow so does your borders. I think this is the way it worked in Civilization 2? It makes the spacing between your cities more important than ever.
The ending is decided by the end of the Modern Times. I don’t think it matters if you won the previous ages, as long as you’re the first to reach your objectives in the Modern Times. For the economic track you must build a railway network and push factory goods around your civilization to win as a Railroad Tycoon. (who wouldn’t want to see a modern take on that old game?) The science win is to send a manned spaceship to space. The military win is to take over settlements from other civilizations and the culture win is to display 15 relics in your civilization.
Once you reach the end, the game is finished. You can’t continue playing as you could in other games. Delete your save file and start again.
What I liked about Civilization 7 is that they dared to change the formula. It was very brave of them to try new things with such a beloved franchise, and I think I would have been a bit disappointed if Civilization 7 just was an update of graphics from Civilization 6. I kind of like the new system with the ages, but I wish they would have split the Modern Age into several ages instead of having one long age from 1750-2000. I hardly got to play anything with the modern arms like fighter airplanes, because the age ended too early, and with that the game also ended.
I didn’t like what they did with culture, and having a second research tree. I couldn’t really tell science research and culture research apart and I thought it was unnecessary. I agree to removing culture as a way to adjust your borders, as it previously was easy to culture bomb a civilization, but I don’t like that borders are only defined by the size of my cities. In the second continent we ended up with a patch work of cities and different countries, where none of it were cohesive. It looked really weird to me.
Some of the systems feel half baked, like religion. I launched my religion in the Middle Ages and affected the whole world with my belief system, and then in the next age the whole concept was gone. Religion was no longer a thing, and I’m not really sure what purpose it had in the first place. It felt like one of those game mechanics that weren’t completed and they didn’t know what to do with.
By the end of the game I was going for both economic and scientific win, and I don’t really know which one I got. I was close to finishing both of them and then I got “Modern Times Ended” and “You Win, Exit to the Main Menu”. There was no cinematic showing my people going to Alpha Centauri. There was no statistics showing the progress of my civilization through the game. There was no option to continue playing. There wasn’t even credits. Just a notification “You win” and please exit the game.
That was a massive disappointment. I loved the old statistics you would get at the end of the game where you would see that the Roman Empire was indeed much larger at the beginning of the game, but it was crushed by the Ottomans. I think this was a big big failure.
The thing that everyone complains about on the internet is the bad UI, which is actually pretty bad, and the constant crashes. The problem with the UI is both trying to see what is going on, but also easy things like finding my marker, or selecting choices on the screen. Only some of the dialoges are voiced (I think it was the science research) and I do miss Sean Beans voice.
The crashes didn’t bother me much because it took less than a minute to get back into the game and I never lost any progress. The game is also quite buggy with units disappearing and tooltips getting stuck on screen.
I don’t think this game is finished. I believe that Firaxis got an ultimatum from 2K that they needed to release the game, and they rushed to get it into a playable state. This explains why the Modern Times doesn’t play out, and the game ending abruptly. They never got to finishing the game. It makes me sad and it puts the future of Firaxis and Civilization in a bad state. If they fix the game, I would recommend coming back to it in a years time, but right now I would not recommend playing it.
I rate this game as OKAY.
Replay 