IGN: "Improved warfare and diplomacy are nice, but the desire to streamline and simplify has gone a bit too far." 7/10

The_J

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The review by IGN gives 7/10

The conclusion reads:
"It's not a great game right now, but it could be with time.

Sure, this whole one step forward, two steps back thing is par for the course when it comes to comparing a brand-new Civ to previous ones with years of patches and DLC to refine them. It's not lost on me that people said the same things about the launch of Civ 5, my all-time favorite of the series. So I have an optimistic outlook on Civ 7, despite all my kvetching – and believe me, there’s a lot more minor grievances I could list. I do think a lot of what bugs me about it could be fixed without redesigning the entire thing. They could add better tooltips and game set-up options in a patch. Civ 6 didn’t let you rename cities at launch either, but that was soon added. And naturally, history teaches us a lot of lacking systems can and probably will be fleshed out in expansions. It's not a great game right now, but I believe it could be with time.

At least it comes out of the gate looking slick. One of the only hills – er, mountains – I will die on is that I really don't like the way mountains look. They kind of remind me of a big pile of rocks, or like a kid's papier mache volcano project they made for science class. They don't have the appearance of a nice, realistic range of snow capped peaks like the ones I can see out my window here in Colorado. I'm also really not a fan of the new board-gamey look for undiscovered territory, even though the reveal effect is nice. Give me clouds or an old-timey map over this shiny nonsense any day."
 
I found it interesting that it lead with the interface. I have a number of posts here where I note that III and IV did a better job of presenting information quickly than V and VI, and that I hoped VII would rectify that. It seems not. For example:

In one of my first campaigns, I saw a little guy called a Kahuna wandering around my territory. Now, I could open up the Civilopedia and type in “Kahuna” and find out that he's a unique missionary available to the Hawaiian civ. But bar that, I don't have any information available here on the map about what he is. Is he a military unit? Is he dangerous? What is he doing here? Can I eat him?

It's not necessarily a cardinal sin - I enjoy Vicky II despite it having "the UI that God forgot" according to its designer, but it's also one of those features that's most useful when players are new to the game, so while it can be added later, it's disappointing.

The other thing that stands out from the review is that it doesn't go much into the impressions of the mechanics of the various ages, although there are plaudits for the impact of Influence and the narrative events that have been added. The focus is more on higher-level impressions. And that's one of my concerns - the Humankind effect of the high-level inconsistencies outweighing the lower-level mechanics - the "Ben Franklin leading Persia" effect to use the review's example.

One of the few mentions of age-specific mechanics is not glowing:

I hope you like missionary spam and endless whack-a-mole conversions that you can’t guard against. There's a little bit of strategy to it, like the fact that each settlement can now have a rural and an urban faith that need to be converted separately, but otherwise it’s just spending production to churn out as many Bible-thumpers as you can. I know we all like to make fun of Civ 6's "theological combat," but at least it was something, right?

Perhaps it's just a hard problem to solve, the religious competition angle.

Well, that's the first of them that I've read through, picked due to its middle-of-the-road review score and having read some of the earlier IGN previews. I think it's time for a more positive one next.

Edit: Forgot to mention warfare. It says improved, but reads like a mixed bag to me. Commanders moving units may be the decisive point in its favor, but it also mentions:

The AI still can't present much of a challenge to an experienced player who knows how to exploit the terrain and focus fire on priority targets unless they outnumber you three- or four-to-one

As well as insufficient feedback on the results on inter-turn combat, aside from if units perished - "You’ll get notifications if a unit dies, but not if it’s reduced to its last few hitpoints". Both could be improved over time, but it doesn't sound like a return to the glory days of Civ IV where the AI could keep me on my toes without cranking the difficulty level way up. Although she does mention presenting much of a challenge to an experienced player, so it may still be an improvement.
 
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even if they had since forgotten how unfinished it was at release
That's the challenge for any new game which gets compared to it's mature predecessors!
 
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