As promised (something like two weeks ago), I now offer my skeptic’s thoughts on Civilization V.
Random salient facts:
I pre-purchased the standard edition of the game via Steam. I’ve played three games so far on Epic speed / Prince difficulty: one as India, one as Egypt and one as Russia. I’ve logged about 14 hours and some change since launch (real life keeps distracting me from what’s important, I’m sure you all can identify). I’m on an AMD Phenom II X4 955 quad running at 3.2 ghz. I use 8gb of corsair RAM (I can’t remember the speed at the moment… fast enough). I have an old Geforce 9800 GTX video card on an ASUS M4N82 Deluxe board (one card, not using SLI). I’m running Windows 7 64 bit home edition. I have those $100 logitech decent speakers w/ sub that you get from your local electronics store. I forget what they’re called.
I was one of those who worried that Civilization V would be “dumbed down.” I worried that the desire for broader market appeal would have negative effects on the newest game in the Civ franchise by way of decreasing the complexity of the system. It turns out that this isn’t the case at all. The UI reminds one of Civilization: Revolution, but as many mainstream reviews have suggested, the similarity really does end there.
I also thought that I would either love the game or hate it. For some reason, the weird ‘middle-ground’ that I’ve ended up in never even entered my mind as a possibility. I enjoy the game, but I have some reservations about it too, none of which have anything to do with the level of complexity. It’s still complex. I’m just not sure yet if its complex in the right ways, if that makes sense.
Civilization V is not Civilization IV:
It’s just not. Let’s just put that dead horse to rest right now. I loved IV. I still love IV. But to compare these two games to one another really wouldn’t do either one justice. Some components of IV please me more and some parts of V make me happier. A lot of that is really subjective so we’ll just leave it there for this review. Any comparison to the past can be read as a reference to the Civ pedigree, not exclusively the previous title.
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Random salient facts:
I pre-purchased the standard edition of the game via Steam. I’ve played three games so far on Epic speed / Prince difficulty: one as India, one as Egypt and one as Russia. I’ve logged about 14 hours and some change since launch (real life keeps distracting me from what’s important, I’m sure you all can identify). I’m on an AMD Phenom II X4 955 quad running at 3.2 ghz. I use 8gb of corsair RAM (I can’t remember the speed at the moment… fast enough). I have an old Geforce 9800 GTX video card on an ASUS M4N82 Deluxe board (one card, not using SLI). I’m running Windows 7 64 bit home edition. I have those $100 logitech decent speakers w/ sub that you get from your local electronics store. I forget what they’re called.
I was one of those who worried that Civilization V would be “dumbed down.” I worried that the desire for broader market appeal would have negative effects on the newest game in the Civ franchise by way of decreasing the complexity of the system. It turns out that this isn’t the case at all. The UI reminds one of Civilization: Revolution, but as many mainstream reviews have suggested, the similarity really does end there.
I also thought that I would either love the game or hate it. For some reason, the weird ‘middle-ground’ that I’ve ended up in never even entered my mind as a possibility. I enjoy the game, but I have some reservations about it too, none of which have anything to do with the level of complexity. It’s still complex. I’m just not sure yet if its complex in the right ways, if that makes sense.
Civilization V is not Civilization IV:
It’s just not. Let’s just put that dead horse to rest right now. I loved IV. I still love IV. But to compare these two games to one another really wouldn’t do either one justice. Some components of IV please me more and some parts of V make me happier. A lot of that is really subjective so we’ll just leave it there for this review. Any comparison to the past can be read as a reference to the Civ pedigree, not exclusively the previous title.
continued below...