video-games – Page 3 – My Game Reviews

Why Civilization VII is not a success in 2026

Civilization VII is going to be one year old this week, and it is clear that the game is struggling to compete with the fifteen-year-old Civilization V and also its immediate predecessor, Civilization VI. This is clear sign of a game that has not met the expectations of the fans of the series and the casual audience that should have been flocking to this game which had multimillion dollar marketing and a pedigree behind it. This is a sign that the series in its current trajectory has played itself out and needs to return to what makes Civilization great. It needs to be an experience of constructing a breathing world in an history sandbox.

The developers didn’t even bother to have England as a civilization on launch. They were putting content behind walls and making you, the consumer pay more for at best a mediocre game. This microtransaction method is flying in the face of the fact we used to get a full game on launch with the previous titles. They sold England as an microtransaction like a piece of scrap to make more money on a project which was lacking energy and any sort of vision that went beyond deconstructing their own game.

I have spoken a lot about the issues of Civilization VII and why it is inferior to the previous games:

Another issue that I haven’t really spoken about is the need for competition. Civilization VII’s failure can be seen as the inevitable decadent phase of every human endeavor. The soul of humans extends to the objects we make here.

Civilization VII was taking the fans for granted in a sense. It is decadent style over the shallow substance.

Music is great and graphics are good, but that cannot sell a game anymore like in the past. You need to have good gameplay, especially if you want players to stay around in here.

Civilization VII is basically 3 mini games in one. The game deliberately takes away choice from the player. You reset every single age, and I find such a mechanic not something that really fits with Civilization. The blobbing issue with players becoming too powerful was just a part of the game. The developers were concerned about that too much. Civilization is not a game that is meant to be solved but experienced holistically. The approach they took to fix this issue was taking away the soul of Civilization. These games are sandboxes not linear experiences with some flexibility but one is aware that these games want to focus on the structure of that game.

Civilization games tend to be more focused on making a world rather than just playing a game. That is why the atmosphere of the Civilization games is really important. Civilization II, while an ancient game now, had FMV(Full Motion Video) of actors as the advisors. That creates character and somehow they have taken it out of the recent games. It is too much of a board game. While that may appeal to mostly console gamers, the PC genre is where the true spirit of the Civilization series is. They made a choice of porting it consoles just to squeeze out more money and that did not help the game.

Why is that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is still doing well on Steam Charts a year into the game been on Steam? It’s because the game appealed to its audience, regardless of the creative choices. They kept the spirit of the original game alive in the sequel and improved upon its core gameplay mechanics. When you look at the voice actors in the behind-the-scenes videos or promotions, they seem to be putting energy into the project. Caring about a paycheck isn’t enough, you need to impart your own personal spirit into whatever project you are working on. Civilization VII has only a small amount of that in there, mostly in the music in my opinion. Everything else is pedestrian in its quality in comparison to the previous games.

Civilization VII was looking for an audience which doesn’t really care about Civilization. That’s why the game is struggling to compete with the older civilization games.

The game needed real competition. The video industry has been clustering around the same developers who have gotten comfy having no one to challenge them. Civilization VI began showing this complacency and Civilization VII shows that the series needs to be made anew.

To make a new civilization game, the developers need to return to the roots, and that means Civilization I. Make it simple but complex enough for the modern age of gaming. They need to remove the board game mentality and leave that for an offshoot here. would have given us a real Civilization game.

The important thing is that they need to appeal to the fans and expand their audience without sacrificing the spirit of the original games. Simplicity in video games is really though now with Unreal Engine being so popular but there is a hunger for it which is different from previous gaming generations. People want style not photorealism and I think that bringing that back to Civilization would help to revitalize the Civilization series and return the approval of the fans and casual audiences.

Wild West Pioneers: City Skylines meets the Wild West

Wild West Pioneers is a city builder game with a focus on resource gather set in the Western Expansion phase of the Old West in America.

Here are my ideas for the game.

1. Outlaws who harass the town

I think that many city builders are in two camps. The cozy ones and the ones where there is some outside pressure. The Caesar Series generally was based on having some pressure on the player while the SimCity series more of a cozy game.

Wild West Pioneers needs to have outlaws and their gangs running around in random events. These events should be based on multiple mechanics in the game. I think it would make the game more dyanmic and interesting. Many cozy games end up being chores and boring simply because the player is just looking at graphs and charts here.

2. More than just resources

One of the issues that I have with city builders in our age is that many of them focus too much on resource gathering here. There needs to be a focus on character not just looking at objects on a screen.

This is one issue that I have had with some of the Paradox games. They tend to be too focused on the charts instead of the characters and the story. City Skylines tends to have this issue also where the game is simply too clean and too much of a movie set. I want to see the life of the town, not just collect resources. Such a gameplay loop is more of something you see in the RTS genre, where base building is more important than the personality of the units or structures.

3. Every citizen needs to be unique

One thing that I want to see in the games is that there is a sense that every person in your town is unique. Considering that Wild West Pioneers is dealing with small towns, this should be something the engine can handle here. Virginia City and Carson City were rather modest but had huge personalities that one even struggles to find in some medium sized cities in our age now.

I think that the personality system is really important at cultivating replayablity so players have a willingness to spend more time exploring the game. Too many games tend to have shallow gameplay. Players want to not have work but to have an experience that they can remember. Video games are not meant to be jobs and the developer should remember that there.

4. Mayor system has to matter in the game

I have recently heard that the game is going to have mayors that you can choose. This mechanic should mean something in here. Make them have unique personalities and have different political parties so that the game is more unique in every playthrough.

5. Elections

I think that having elections in this game would give some more flavor to your towns. While I believe that the game will probably add more features in DLCs if it is successful in here, having elections would help make these playthroughs more dynamic and it bring it into line what players want now. With the size of these cities being smaller than most city builders, I think that this should be appropriate for this game.

6. Trains need to play an important role

In many parts of the USA, small towns were supported by a new technology, railways. Cheyenne, Wyoming began as a railway town, so did many other places. The game has to be able to capture this change and vibrancy of the trains steaming into these small towns. The steam train has been a technology that capture the imaginations of that age and they are prefect visual aspects of a video game which can show off the power of an engine.

Why Style matters more than graphics in Video Games, especially now

There is a general consensus among gamers now, that art style matters more than graphics.

The screenshot above is of a 2001 game known as Empire Earth. It looks rather crude now, but it has a unique style that no other game can replicate.

We have seen this with independent games, which replicate the simpler and colorful graphics of older generations. Photorealism is great in Chatbots if one is attempting to brainstorm how a character appears but there is a place for all sorts of artistic styles. The Japanese have shown this in many of their games. Some games aim for photorealism, but they also show that they want to continue their tradition of having many art styles, especially their homegrown anime. Japanese games often have a reputation for being more stylistic and it’s not surprising that Nintendo did not give up on their original IPs in favor of more mature ideas. They sometimes did have more mature games in their earlier consoles, but this was to compete with Sega and after Sega was beaten, they began to focus on their generally cozy game reputation here.

Style matters more than graphics. I remember that in the 1990s, graphics cards companies had managed to change this idea. Graphics were more important than style as many programmers wanted to showcase the power of their inhouse engines. This was the age of graphics growing every year here. It was truly an exciting age where every game seemed like a foreign country with its own rules.

Now every game seems to have the same GPS navigation and isn’t really interesting here. Unreal Engine is used heavily in many games now, but it is also getting in the way of helping games to distinguish their styles from one another.

It isn’t just in the graphics. It is also in the interfaces also. The interfaces in earlier games were art styles that were peculiar to that one game. Now, too much of it is optimized to be interchangeable between genres and games.

We need to have friction once again. That may make things some what more uncomfortable to use but it will allow for a greater variety of games to made.

The independents are often cited as an example of creativity. However, they cannot carry the industry alone here. They need to work in synergy with middle budget and high budget games. The independents are often works of passion, but they lack the ability to get a product out to the gamers within a reasonable time before they have their attention going to somewhere else.

Style is what companies should be chasing now. We have enough photorealistic games. With generative AI, photorealism is available in a way that surpasses even the best camera.

What we need now is way to encourage the creation of new styles instead of just attempting to outcompete on the issue of photorealistic graphics.