Civilization VII – My Game Reviews

What Empire Earth has that Civilization VII still doesn’t have

Civilization VII right before Thanksgiving has only around 7.5 thousand players right now playing it on Steam.

I have already talked about how Civilization VII was a failure and the game is basically the dark ages of the Civilization franchise. The dark ages of course had brightness in it, such as in Charlemagne’s court. Civilization VII burned brightly at the beginning as so many games do and it fails to continue capturing people’s attention.

I watched with great interest at how Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Civilization VII would perform together as they were released close to one another.

They are different genres, but they are both historical games with have audiences that overlap.

It is a tale of two games. Both burn brightly upon release but they are not the same. Kingdom Come 2, in spite of there being a high skill ceiling for this game, managed to tell an interesting story in 15th Century Bohemia and give a narrative from many class perspectives.

Civilization VII simply seems like an entry in a franchise which is exhausted in energy.

The game should have been pc-centric not console centric as it seems that it was. The willingness to put the game in VR makes no sense for a series that has largely been on the PC. Its soul began on the PC, and the console versions were a necessary addition but the main part of the franchise’s energy.

Empire Earth has what a lot of what the gaming industry doesn’t have now. The energy and the soul which makes it special here.

The importance of a holistic integration of many gameplay and design elements into a video game is vital for keeping it going in the memories of gamers.

What Civilization VII was missing: The Demographics Screen

Civilization III Demographics and Top Cities

The screenshot above showcases the demographic screen in Civilization III.

In the early 2000s, developers were not afraid to put out some statistics on a screen. It was a nice practical way of showing on how the world in your Civilization game was changing and who was on top in the battle for civilizational supremacy.

In Civilization VII, we get three mini games as a replacement for it.

Civilization VII was a game that burned brightly before being surpassed by both Civilization VI and V. I have already stated why I think that the game is one of the worsts mainline entries other than maybe Beyond Earth.

There are many reasons that I have gone into about why I do not like this game. However, one of the most important reasons why I had issues with it was that the change from a game with macro view of history to a game with micro views.

The game simply does not like you think about the people in the empire. It is a board game where you just move units around it. Civilization in a way has always been this way. However, with Civilization V, the game has been moving away from a balance of the macro and micro. Now we barely get macro. Micro is rather shallow and uninteresting.

The citizen’s faces are not there now. They are simply nameless, opaque icons to move on the screen. Nationality in Civilization III was also very important, and it gave a sense of character to the game.

Civilization VII’s developers need to keep the spirits up and think that there are no big issues with the game. However, the game is not garnering much attention. No matter how many updates that they make, the game is simply not going to be well remembered by gamers.

It was the Dark Age of the Civilization Series. The next game, Civilization VIII is going to made more quickly vs the time gap between Civilization VI and VII.

Civilization VII takes away all the nerdy aspects and shows what happens when you become too mainstream and forget your origins. This is a common problem throughout the industry now. There is no soul to the games only the smell of money hiding behind the corner of every pixel you see.

Civilization VIII needs to return to what made the games great and memorable even among people who barely even played video games.

I think that Civilization VIII will be a much better game and it will start the prosess of repairing the franchise but we are going to have wait and see.

Civilization 7 Review: The Worst Game in the Series.

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.