I'm lost all respect for 1up.com for letting this review get posted: he bases his score off of CivIV, not gaming in general, and even then a C is just pure BS. He goes off on social policies not properly reflecting the concept of tough decisions, but having already played the game I know that they're a fun aspect, and do involve making choices, including deciding whether to expand your empire (and thereby make it increasingly harder to acquire new policies). A critical review with really bad critical analysis, and some hubris thrown in (the "Chick Parabola"?, what a joke).
Isn't this the same guy who said Deus Ex was "90% bad"?
edit: Why yes, it is.
Even if he had given the game A+, I would have still said his review was crap, can't forget the worst review ever made for one of the greatest rpg-style FPS.
You can't change combat animations in game? What the hell???
I was only playing the demo for now, so I did not notice it yet. But seriously - they are already getting on my nerves sometimes. Until this point I thought C was a bit harsh, but for this alone he's right. That is so easy to fix and so annoying when it can't be done...
He mentioned in his review (and I believe he's right) that you can only disable the animations when you're setting up the game, in the advanced settings. The options menu, in general, leaves a lot to be desired: you can't change any video settings and there's no options for worker automation (I assume they can chop down trees and destroy whatever improvements they like, no documentation on it). The game right now feels like a really pretty wall: it's nice to look at and sorta play with (draw pictures on it?), but you have no idea what the inner workings are for so many systems, as you did in CivIV.
Thirdly, it's just a matter of looking at the history of Civilization IV and you soon realise that "OOPS! They did it again!". The game probably won't be very interresting until after the first expansion pack and after many patches.
Civilization 4 BTS with patches and PIG Mod is such an amazing game, definitely one of my all time favorites. I have to judge Civilization 5 on those merits and as far as I can tell it fails to deliver.
That's not fair to CivIV, though: vanilla CivIV was excellent, even with its problems (I have more gameplay problems with CiV, had more bug problems with CivIV). I love BTS + PIG mod as well, but if for whatever reason those two weren't available, I could still open up vanilla CivIV and still have a blast: BTS didn't mess with the core gameplay, it just improved on the edges. PIG just has a lot of wonderful extra information that I really want to see in CiV :-D. It would be awfully hard to buy new games if you only ever judged them on their previous iteration, with all of its expansion packs and patches installed.