1up.com review posted

[Infiltrator]

Mature response.

I thought Deus Ex was widely overrated and hyped. I didn't enjoy it and Chick's review expressed my view on the game accurately. Plenty of people liked it, and that's fine. Reviewing games isn't a popularity contest.

As mature as his review. It's probably got more to do with him trying to be different than others than anything else.

Deus Ex was never really overrated nor hyped. At the time marketing hype machines practically did not exist so I can't see how you've reached that conclusion.

Anyway it appears he's trying to be the black sheep once again to me, except he's doing a poor job at it. If he wants to bash on everything he should at least take some lessons from zero punctuation.

 

[Me,myself,and,I]

And there is another reviewer, and former game dev, I'll post a link when I find him again, that said ciV is probably the best strategy game to come out in twenty years. It's all a matter of opinion.

 

[wilebill]

At Metacritic, the current score is 9.1 based on 29 pro reviews, including Tom Chick's C. Gamespot gave it a 9.0. The User Score at Gamespot is 9.1 based on 347 player scores.

Perhaps Tom was sending a message to Firaxis? If so, what will be its long term effect on the future development of this game? If any.

As for the review itself, most of the criticisms seem based on solid game play experience and sound reasoning. I liked the review. Looking at things from my own point of view I think a 9.4 or 9.5 is what the game will deserve two or three years from now.

 

[dannythefool]

As for for Chick's review, I think a C is defensible though I might have gone with a B-.

When I read reviews, I don't really care about the score. I gather as much information about a game as possible and then try to match it to my expectations. And for this purpose, this review just fails. It leaves out important parts of the game, and it bases a lot of what it doesn't omit on what things were like in Civ IV. I know what Civ IV is like, I played it for five years now, I don't need a review for a different game to tell me that the author likes it as well.

I don't mind if he gives the game a C, it's obvious it's not an A+ at this time, but the review itself is just not very useful for me.

 

[Gre_Magus]

Jon Schafer made a bold move departing from the transparent, "others civs are part of the world", "gamey" diplomatic system of Civ 4 and going with the "your playing against another player who's out to win" system of Civ 5. In the end, "gamey" is not bad, because games are fun; it's fun to do things like spread your religion to make friends, just like it's fun to beeline to alphabet and then trade it for 3 or 4 other techs plus gold. But it was also fun to make a spread sheet, calculate worker moves, tile yields, and figure out how to pump out a settler every 4 turns in Civ 3, never worrying about how mysterious maintenance was going to punish you for expanding as fast as possible. Heck, it was also fun to build 6 workers and take your capital city to twelve the turn after you finished your aqueduct.

Don't hate on a man because he gave the game you like a "C"! I loved Halo PC - an "A" in my book - but I would give Call of Duty 4 a "C". I love the real time battles in the Total War series, but the strategy portion is unnecessarily plodding and repetitive. Hearts of Iron III is fun, and that's as buggy as all heck!

Second, it is totally legitimate to score a game based on how it plays when it's released. Things like AI and bugs ought to be polished on release, not after a few months.

 

[Markstar]

How about you look at the review itself instead of just dismissing it because he wrote something in the past that you don't agree with. Geez. Like little children here.

Personally, I agree with lots of stuff he wrote and disagreed with some as well. But overall I think he got it right.

I played the second game as king and had no trouble exploiting the AIs horribly weak strategy dominate my continent. I love the social policies, but do think there should be some way to change you government, probably with a 100-turn delay or something. I also like the city states, but imo they are not that big of a deal. UI is horrible, though, and sorry, after such arrogant claims from the developers I really expected more, but instead got a bit mess. Also, MP is a joke - Civ is a turn-based strategy game and you can't play in turns (which is actually easier to program than real-time networking)?

I'm not disappointed though. I wasn't that happy with Civ3 vanilla, regretted my Civ4 purchase (even though I really liked the idea of religions and GPs) and will no be playing this one anytime soon, either.

But I guess it's a decent game for most of the potential customers, but as a hard-core Civ player, this is, in the current state, not a game for me.

 

[Kashim]

His complaints aren't first impressions complaints; they are observations that, basically, once you spend a bit of time playing you'll find that the computer is really bad at waging war. I've never seen a game developer able to fix that class of problem within a given design; it requires rethinking the game structure.

Honestly i found the 1up review uninformative and more focused on showcasing the reviewer than the game. At it's heart is a confrontation with CIV IV that leads to a score put there merely for shock value and more appropriate for an Harry Potter licensed game. Other reviews exposed similar concerns in a non destructive way. Of course the reviewer will come up later with arguments like "the game is good, it's only that i use a different scale..." etc. Meanwhile the review got a million of hits. A clever marketing strategy

Regarding the rest of the argument, I play a lot of strategy games and wargames and the AI is poor even there, but i wouldn't trade a great combat system for one that an AI programmed for a computer game can manage better. Specifically i wouldn't trade the combat system of CIV V for stacks of doom and horrible artillery mechanics.
Elemental is a poor example because everything in that game literally falls apart.

Like other people in the forum i am more concerned about other elements, like the diplomacy that seems to be designed to be integrated with an espionage system (it would explain the lack of info) that wasn't ready for the release.

 

[Starfury]

So what?
At least we now know that, according to 1up, the game is just a little worse than Elemental was.

 

[abso]

like the diplomacy that seems to be designed to be integrated with an espionage system (it would explain the lack of info) that wasn't ready for the release.

if the AI builds diplomatic ties like pacts and alliances, this would be some info i would like to have before I go to war with some AI player. it might be I cannot access that info until I develop some ability at some point in time. But letting the AI build alliances and never showing to to the human player, even in, say, year 2020 - that's really releasing a non-finished game, or a game lacking of features we should pay for later.

was there diplomacy in Civ Revolution?

 

[dannythefool]

was there diplomacy in Civ Revolution?

Yes there is diplomacy, it's not as powerful as in Civ IV or Civ V though. It's little more than tech trading and declaring/ending wars. Not even open borders.

 

[Pangaea]

Enjoy.

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3181540

Thanks. That's the best and most honest review I've read so far

 

[mrt144]

I like how the posts decrying the review focus on:

1. His past reviews
2. An esoteric belief that it's just to get attention
3. He's evaluating the game as a comparison to other Civ games

None of these are a good defense for some pretty poignant and obvious statements he made in his review.

 

[LoneWolf5050]

So far, my first game on Prince (or whatever the middle level is called), feels more like a Settler game in previous versions of Civ. I'm looking forward to trying Deity for the first time ever in my Civ playing history, and seeing if I can beat it, because the way this AI is looking so far, I don't think it could fight its way out of a paper bag. I'm a little shocked frankly. The AI is the most important aspect of the single player experience. What is the point of a game of Civ if you don't have a challenge...might as well play simcity.

I hope Firaxis takes Tom's review to heart and improves on all the things he mentioned, especially the AI.

For the Social Policies, I think it would be cool if you still bought them like you do now, but you had a limit on how many policies you could have active at once, say only three or something like that. So you still have all the decisions about what you want to buy, but you have that either/or choice still about what you want to focus on at the moment.

--Julian

 

[the_lor]

C feels a bit harsh to me. Honestly I’m only 3 hours into my first game so I haven’t experienced everything yet. I feel like it’s a solid game with a great base to patch/expand on. I’d give it a B with a potential to be a solid A in the future.

Even cleaning up a couple minor things like fixing path issues and things like that would make the game a lot better.