Category: video-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.

Streaming Empire Earth on Twitch

Twitch is an intriguing little site. While it isn’t little in its cultural impact on the internet, there is something to said about how “media” ignores it. There are so many users who spending time on Twitch who have audiences in the tens of thousands and yet because it is not something that the older generations understand, they are not picking up on it and trying to understand it. In some ways, I like how Twitch is popular yet hidden away. Unlike YouTube, there is no presence of the old brands trying to muscle their way onto the site. YouTube basically gave up on its own userbase in favor of propping up TV stations that had their start in the 1950s. Linear Television should remain where it is; YouTube is its own thing and that’s better for the internet as a whole. However, in the rush for ever greater profits over building the internet into something useful, they have flooded YouTube with all these useless recommendations and taken away its creativity. I still use it as there are redeeming qualities to it, but there needs to be more competition here.

Here are some screenshots of the session that I streamed on Twitch. I realized that I was playing without the right output at the time but I still count it as a stream.

The screenshot below is from a successful stream. I decided to test out whether my settings were correct and whether the video was playing back to any viewers. Sure enough, it was. I did a quick random match on a continental map. Empire Earth’s AI loves to cheat so I didn’t want a stream where it was a difficult game so I had an AI ally with me.

It was an enjoyable experience but I need to do more streams before I get a handle on this site.