Category: games

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.

Gaming Journalism and the fall of Polygon.

It is not surprising to me that Polygon, one of the most infamous gaming sites on the internet is having major job cuts. The video game industry’s journalism side has always been a strange place. On one hand, it began as an offshoot of the computer nerd magazines of the 1970s. Many people who started writing for such publications, were nerds and not activists. They just loved computers as much as the software and programming nerds.

However, video gaming has changed and we now have tons of publications that are run by activists. Many of them wished to be on cable news or some left-wing internet news site. Instead, they settled on video gaming where they can spread their influence into this industry.

For a while, it seemed that their influence was not going anywhere. They popped up in every search result on Google or Bing. Gamespot and IGN had been successful and Polygon just represented the next stage of online gaming journalism. However, things are not that simple.

Why is it that these publications are cutting jobs like crazy?

It’s because they were not writing about video games anymore.

Every game that came from a big developer was basically a review that was ”sponsored” and not the person’s actual opinion. Even on YouTube, which was once a haven of truth, had become infested with corporate sites.

The reviewers became obessed with checklists of what the game represented to them instead of focusing on what made these video games, simply video games. Too many sites wanted to impose Hollywood on video games.

Video games have to be allowed to be video games. That means that not everything has to be politically correct. The nature of games is similar to that of animation, too much regulation gets in the way of the medium’s ability to express ideas.

What journalists need to accomplish is go back to writing about the games not about the politics. That what we want as gamers as the industry continues its changes.