Category: Critiques

Civilization 7 Review: The Worst Game in the Series.

Civilization VII Rivers

Civilization 7 is the worst game in the series. There are some who want to say that it has new ideas and not recycled ideas. I am guessing these are casual gamers or people who are easily swayed by marketing because this is basically SimCity Societies from 2007 in a Civ Game.

The issue is that the players who played the older games before Civ V have been seeing the changes and that it is becoming very much like Angry Birds and other forgotten mobile games, just a brand to put on mediocre gameplay and hide it with marketing.

The UI is terrible and when compared to Civ 1, it shows the generational changes and the malaise we are currently in this culture.

The Civ switching was a concern of mine earlier on and I see that Fraxis was lazy and put in a bunch of leaders who are not leaders but Great People.

The game does not have England in the game but hides behind a DLC and puts in a person, Ada Lovelace, who was not a political leader, phlisophical, or spiritual leader in any sense. The leader of England should be a King or Prime Minister. I would recommend King Charles II of the Restoration Era.

The Shawnee were put in the game for politics and yet Confucius can rule them. Do not use the CIV has never been about history. It has a tech tree which contains many of the most important technologies in human history. This is not a very good argument to using here.

The crisis system is lazy and does not provide context for what is happening. Having every Civ move into the same age is silly and makes the game too easy. There needs to be consequences to not being able to catch up in tech or economics. Having a reset does not make the game challenging. The Civ Switching doesn’t even stop the snowballing that they say they wanted to not have.

It is clear that the game has increasingly become attached to politics in America more and not just a game about history.

The map generation is terrible and worse than 20 year old games.

The positive reviews are people who generally enjoy simpler, easier games. While Microsoft is no saint of a company, they have made AOE 4 into a game that appeals to casuals and power users. They even encourage people to improve their tactics while also being a great platform for teaching history about multiple cultures, without being myopic about it.

Civilization 7 is the worst in the series. Civilization V was a strange experiment on launch but they did not railroad the player into 3 mini games.

M3GAN-A seminal Cyberprep Movie or Neo-Cyberpunk Movie

I have only watched clips of M3GAN but the plot is quite familar to me. It is the story of a robot going aganist its servitude and becoming self-aware and how conflict begins here. However, M3GAN has something unique which is it is the encapsulation of a style or sensiblity. It is known as Cyberprep. While there is a clothing style known as Cyberprep, I am talking about a subgenre of Cyberpunk here. To some, Cyberprep is Captialism’s attempt to subvert the Cyberpunk genre, which seeks to create a digital space that is more about cooperatives and the sharing of information for the furthering of human knowledge instead of refining consumerism in global capitalism in our culture. Cyberprep is some sense is the sanitization of cyberpunk and acknowledgment of regression in styles.

Some people in the more left-wing circles have been trying to make M3GAN into a icon of identity politics, the truth is simplier. M3GAN is a movie about transition of styles in America.

Previously, such movies had distinct style which harkened back to two styles I will describe here. While there are offshoots and every movie is different, there are two types in my opinion.

1. Cyberpunk Classic(Japan)

This is the Cyberpunk which everyone knows. It is the one with the Neon lights and the Japanese characters. This is what people think of when they think about Cyberpunk. In the 1980s, it was at its height in media. It is generally an extension of the rebel culture of the 1960s. It is about embracing one’s individuality online. It had an eye on the up-and-coming growing Japan. The Asian country, already with rich tradition of automata in its ancient times during the Heian and Tokugawa eras, was becoming a focal point of what people though the future was going to be. Japanese society, which conformity but also innovation, allowed for a consistency in style. Rural Japan and Urban Japan had their differences, but they tended to be on the same wavelength culturally. In America, the gap is larger between the city and country. While the radio would start the process of closing such gaps, it remains wider than in places such as in Japan.

2. 1990s Internet Chic

This is a refinement of Cyberpunk and the sensibility is more corporate. The internet in its beginning was a computer system known as Aparnet. It was more for scientific purposes and the military, a result of the need to share knowledge during the Cold War. The internet would then go into a transition phase into becoming more commercial as time went on.

By the beginning of the World Wide Web, Hypertext Markup Language(HTML) had become standard and was remaking the nature of internet networks.

With the rise of websites, the internet merged with Cyberpunk but it was no longer about the clunky hardware. While CRT computers were reigning on the throne, the nature of connectivity was no longer about putting on bulky VR headsets. It was now something was contained within a cyberspace. This cyberspace was not navigated with hardware but was hitching a ride on copper wires that were venerable veterans in telecommunications.

M3GAN represents an updating of the 2nd style here.

Generally speaking, M3GAN and its themes are focused on the upper middle-class experience. While some people may say that the robot is not realistic, I think that it makes a lot of sense here. M3GAN is a product of a brilliant if awkward mind. Gemma is genius but held back by the Capitalist system. M3GAN is a representative of Cyberprep.

M3GAN clothing is a throwback to the 1980s Corporate woman, who would often wear clothes in that style. Indeed, such a robot has a fashion sense which is more sophisticated than most Americans now. I would even say that she is reminiscent of a small girl in the body of an upper middle-class woman in 1940s America.

M3GAN is representative of a capitalist system which is starting to fortify in its enclaves. There is no interest in helping the average person even understand what they are getting into. Cyberprep is the Cyberpunk without the edge. The elite of today in places such as Seattle is not interested in guiding mankind towards greatness; it is more about their own people.

M3GAN is really about the palace battles in the corporate halls. To the people farming shimp on the Bayou, M3GAN seems like something out of a Middle Eastern Fantasy story with flying carpets.

M3GAN is true Cyberprep cinema

Why Civilization VII is a terrible game: Civilization VII should have been a PC-Centric Game

Civilization VI is better than Civilization VII because it is for PC Gamers and its shows in the terrain and size of maps.
A warrior unit exploring a diverse terrain in Civilization VII, featuring plains, hills, and water.

Civilization VII is continuing to fall in obscurity on Steam. The company, Firaxis Games is still living in a reality where they believe that the game is successful. However, it seems that they are more interested in pushing with their multiplatform games which are not selling on the charts. This inability to think critically about their game is why the game is doing so poorly with gamers. Civilization V is currently ahead of the game consistently now. Why is this? Simply because it is not a PC centric game.

Being a PC centric game makes sense for Civilization. When they announced this game, I was suspecting that the quality would suffer. I was right and I should have been more careful here. Civilization VII doesn’t even respect its title, its not about civilization but about city states. PC-centric games tend to be big in scale not just tiny mobile games. That is what Civilization VII is missing.

I think that we should understand what it means that the game is on all these platforms here. It means that the team is wasting their time trying to milk the game for all its worth and not trying to build something sustainable.

I honestly believe that Civilization VII is going to be dark age of the Civilization games.

It isn’t selling well, and it does not have big player base on Steam. Civilization VI is already ahead of it.

Civilization VII should be made for PC gamers and then they could move towards console games.

Console games have their own territory and PC games have theirs. The obsession with putting the game on Meta’s VR systems is just a sign of a company that isn’t serious about the game.

They no longer seem to care about their player base and just want to hide behind videos and screenshots.

It would be better if someone else would make Civilization from now on, because they are not doing a good job with it.

Civilization VI will still be the Emperor, while Civilization VII will be sulking in the shadows as a game that will be obscurity and a lesson in that game studio’s reputation depends on the gamers.