Bough the game and refunded it. After 30 min.
Don't tell me that I have to play it though to know if I like it or not. I knew immediately that I didn't like civ 5. I loved civ 6. Civ 2 and 3. Even after countless of hours on civ 6 people were telling me that civ 5 is best version ever, so I gave it several tries. Its not. Still don't like it. So no, you don't have to play a game for x amount of hours and x amount of playthroughs until you find it enjoyable. Its either good from the get go or it isn't. Civ 7 isn't.
Lets me go a bit in depth as I didn't on my review on steam page.
I play games for the feel of it. For the fantasy of it. Either that be football manager where you take charge of a team and bring it to glory, or take a civilization under your command and build it up to be the greatest. This manifests very early in the game. With good games, and civ likes, you very early on get attachment to who ever you are playing as. You feel a sense of responsibility, joy, excitement. There is no such thing in civ 7. You can't connect your feelings to a random leader, leading a country that isn't his.
All reviews and plays I've seen on youtube have been telling me how this isn't a bad thing. They are sponsored shills. There is no way in hell, this is a good thing. It totally disconnects you from the immersion. You are basically playing a puzzle game they've set up and try to win on conditions they've set up. You are no longer playing for building a great nation and conquering the world, rather, you are just mix-maxing stats on this small island (yes, it feels like an island), to achieve certain points and reach goals of the game. Civ feel is about a sandbox game, where victory goals are the ones you set up for your great civilization. But no, now you have to get x amount of this and that, during each age and it calculates your score. I'm telling you, its a mix-maxing puzzle game and you will realize this very early. (And don't come to me telling me that civ games have always been about min-maxing, because they haven't). Not only that, they figured out, why fudge up immersion only once in the start of the game, lets fudge it up 3 times during game. Also, lets fudge all the hard work the player did and just fudge up his stuff couple times during game.
So they fudged it up this much and thought, lets fudge up immersion even more for everybody. And then they decided to add a tutorial to the game that pops up non-stop over entire screen. (It has to be over entire screen because game is designed for controller platforms like switch). Not only does this ruin your first impression of the game, it also overloads users with information that they would usually gather over a longer period of time. There is no fudging need for tutorials in games. If your game isn't self explanatory and simple in the start, you have failed at game design. Which they clearly did.
As you probably already know, the UI is terrible. I understand why it's terrible, but I really don't care about this. What gets my juices going is all the people who says that once the UI is fixed and tooltips and such, game will be great. It won't. Bad UI is just a symptom of a larger fudge up. And people focusing on UI and blaming UI for reason the game feels bad, just don't want to realize that the actual game is bad. So they are blaming UI and saying how everything will be fine once this is fixed. And they do this because they still have hope that this fudge up can somehow turn around and become a decent game. But deep down they know the game is terrible.
Graphics doesn't make the game. Everybody is praising graphics, and they are great to look at, as a wallpaper. But they messed up hugely. Everything blends into each other. Specially when you are zoomed out a bit, its really hard to distinguish units, buildings and environment. They have no idea about object separation.
Then there are people playing the game and are clearly enjoying the game on youtube and in reviews on steam. So how can game be bad? They haven't realized it yet. The hype and euphoria is still huge and people are blind to constructive criticism. The real test comes a couple months later. Is the "just one more turn" still there then? Is it there after a week?
0/10, worst crap I've played in this entire franchise.
I think the leaders help a ton
