An Egyptian Benjamin Franklin to a French Augustus Caesar or a lore accurate Russian Catherine the Great, “Civilization VII” mixes your choice of characters and civilizations to conquer the world. Sid Meier’s “Civilization VII” is a turn-based strategy city builder game that was released worldwide Feb. 11 after seven years of development. The game was released for Steam, PS5 and PS4, Xbox and the Nintendo Switch with a price tag of $70 and $100 for the game and additional downloadable content.
It is part of the Civilization franchise that was established in 1991. When it was announced at Gamescom last year, it became the first thing on my Steam wishlist. Since the franchise’s last game release was nearly a decade ago, it was highly anticipated by fans, but in my opinion, it fell short of what myself and others had expected.
The goal of the game is to conquer the world by completing one of four different victory conditions against AI or friends. These include a cultural victory where your influence is so great that no other civilization can oppose you, a militaristic victory where you conquer every other civilization, a commerce victory where you buy out every other civilization and a science victory where you finish the first mission to space.
This newer version of “Civilization” has the ability for specific world leaders to mix with different civilizations based on their era. This differs from previous “Civilization” games where you would select one civilization with a predetermined leader. Each time you enter a new era, antiquity, exploration and modern, you would be forced to change your civilization to one befitting your current nation. All the while, your leader would stay the same, providing you with the same perk each era.
In the game’s advertisements, the graphics were genuinely stunning compared to the cartoonish look for “Civilization VI,” and yet there was still something lackluster. Booting the game up on release day, it occurred to me that the game was heavily unoptimized, making it extremely laggy because of the textures used. Even with 16 gigabytes of RAM and an RTX 3050, each save took a horrendous 2-3 minutes to boot each time on the second to highest graphics.
Multiplayer mode was one of the main factors for purchasing the game since all “Civilization” games are much more enjoyable with friends. The problem was that with the first release, the game was very unstable and multiplayer seemed like it was still in development. Joining a multiplayer lobby caused crashes and made playing with it impossible, eventually being fixed a month after the original release in an update.
The game was fun for the first few days until it hit me that problems from past “Civilization” games were still too strong. For example, focusing on producing only science allowed me to research technologies much faster, outpacing the AI at great speeds. This made playing the game much easier than was expected and forced the game into a repetitive state.
Another problem that I had with the game was the unskippable cutscenes of each civilization’s leader. A number of times, I misclicked a troop and wasted its turn because of an in-game notification appearing. There is no option to turn this off and since the first update was released for the game, no such setting exists.
Overall, the game is fun and enjoyable, but the large number of downsides makes the purchase an incredibly difficult decision. With a $70 price tag on Steam for the base game, it feels like The publisher of the game, Firaxis, only intends to take advantage of consumers. I would recommend you only purchase the game if you have played “Civilization” games in the past or have friends who also plan to play the game.
