Revisiting Civ V reviews (or a Civ V retrospective)

[apocalypse105]

Sulla, you shameless self promoter, you are worst than me and that copyright thing.

Civilization V does have a fantastic presentation, the animations, the interface, all of those things are exceptional as a whole. I do not agree that it would had not received spectacular reviews had it not been a Civilization game because the game does indeed look the part. It would be unfair not to say so.

And it's not like these reviews are flat out lying, it's that in turn they did not delve deeper into Civ V (more on that later). I mean when they say that Civ looks amazing and they show this screen cap, they don't have to overly embellish it, it's already there:

look at that thing, that's in the game!.


When they say that the game is fun, again, they do not have to word it up differently, they show it and it looks really awesome:

Yeah son, make that cannon jump on that unit.


And it's not just these reviews, even other reviewers that are in no way affiliated to larger corporations gave it amazing reviews, for example this guy:

http://angryjoeshow.com/2010/09/civilization-v-review/

AngryJoe would never lie!, and he doesn't, he's 100% sincere about it when he says the game is like cocaine (his words). He also mentions problem with multiplayer and Diplomacy, yet still thinks the game is awesome (final rating: 8/10).

And even Tom Chick thought the game was great, but that just needed a few patches here and there. And to be fair his review does read like he's flip floping badly:

So which one is it Tom?, I kinda feel you are just honoring 1up's classic fair but whiny editorial style.

First 50 hours?, Civ V is awesome!, 50 hours later? a few seams start to show, and then some (150+ hours you know all of the stuff that's lacking).

For me this has been a bitter year for Civ V for reasons that are completely different, I felt Firaxis has been a bit standoffish with the fans by not addressing established crowd-pleasers that they know will mean a lot to their super loyal fan base (mods, multiplayer, ai and end game). I know they have released many patches (again, fixing everything and nothing at the same time), but it seems their main focus after a year has been elsewhere for the most part.

Coming to the knowledge that the Civilization franchise is more of a business to them can be just heartbreaking (probably because it is a business, but lets not bring reason into this). I think that's were a lot of us are now, because revisiting those reviews made me thought "damn I want THAT game that they are reviewing so bad".

Well at least AngryJoe was honest about the diplomacy part... I thinx I saw a few reviews who dare to say that. Shame on you gamespot

BTW you are talking about someone who never played civilization for angryjoe this is his first civilization game. So how can he properly compare it with civilization 4..

And thats what I usally look if I see a review about a expansion/ next edition of a game.

Still he did a good job everything is fine except diplomacy wich he made fun of in his video review so yeah He didn't managed the bad combat AI.

 

[Venger]

...AND Sulla pwns the thread.

I am enjoying Civ V right now, just whipped up a victory on a Immortal Large Map as Greece and am scraping through a Deity game as Rome despite getting a 100+ turn DoW from the Ottomans (funny, it would have been easier with the other country in each game). Fun, but I can't help but notice how poorly 1UPT truly functions, the asinine diplomacy, and all the little things that aren't there that are in my Civ 4 games.

I think Civ V is fun, but it's still the mentally handicapped stepbrother to Civ4.

 

[Tabarnak]

Game was bad when release. It improved, but not enough(especially for sp players). What i don't like is that devs didn't improve this game much to a decent level after over 1 year now. How can this be so long?

At least, the 1upt feature is pretty nice in multiplayer games. Well more suited for human brains. More players play civ5 than civ4 multiplayer(from civplayers.com at least). But here again, the multiplayer platform sucks too(waiting for that next patch)

 

[Ruler]

Game was bad when release. It improved, but not enough(especially for sp players). What i don't like is that devs didn't improve this game much to a decent level after over 1 year now. How can this be so long?

At least, the 1upt feature is pretty nice in multiplayer games. Well more suited for human brains. More players play civ5 than civ4 multiplayer(from civplayers.com at least). But here again, the multiplayer platform sucks too(waiting for that next patch)

No competitor. We can hope maybe we start to see first competitor and thus we get better games. Other devs must have noticed Civ series by now. People whine and moan but yet buy every DLC there is and play the game.

Someone who's been playing since Civ 2 and I think Civ 5 aint so bad.

 

[OrsonM]

I think we should all end the Civ year on a note of optimism as well.

 

[Ruler]

Definitely, I think Civ has that mainstream appeal too, and why not, its pretty casual simple game after all still offering challenge for hundred of hour, kind of easy-to-learn-hard-to-master kind of game.

Ive waited years now when other devs start to tackle games like Total War or Civ, instead they like to dump all money on Shooters.

 

[MoonFlare]

Reviewers are not the main problem. The main problem is that gaming now is an industry of entertainment. It needs to appeal to large amounts of people. Many of you can remember the days when gaming was something about you and your friends. When you could come over to your friends house and turn that PC(or Amiga or any other early version) or a gaming console. I moved to PC from consoles and i still have a lot of great memories about those games. And i still play them today on an emulator.
Nowadays everyone has access to gaming. But not a lot of people can adapt to old school gameplay. That is why Wii is so popular. Casual cancer at it's finest. There are great games on it but for the most part it's something that even the most desperate housewives can play. And that = $$$
Dumbing down is a priority. Things like health regeneration is shooters, less complex strategy games, graphics > gameplay. Take a big name from the past(X-COM, Syndicate), turn it into a FPS and people will buy it.
Reviewers are part of the industry. They are getting money for talking about games. There are a few that rely MOSTLY on selling magazines(PCgamer for example) but every else...how do they get money for food, rent and all those games? The most corrupt by far is gametrailers dot com. They should be ignored.
Good review + ads on that review site = good sales. Idiots rely on reviews "because reviewers are professionals who know everything about gaming".

 

[Lance of Llanwy]

While I do not have proof, I still say all the reviewers (ok 99% of them) were all bought/bribed/co-ereced into giving awsome reviews for Civ V.

If they were not bought/bribed/co-ereced into giving awsome reviews, then I will buy the explanation of they want 2K's advertising $$$ for the future, so treated Civ V with "kids glove".

All I want is an explanation of how Not ONCE was there any mentions of bugs in the game, but as soon as Fallout New Vegas comes out, all I read in reviews is how buggy the game was.

So how come New Vegas gets scolded and Civ V doesn't? Right there, that tells you that the "proffesional reviewers" do not reviews games equally. There is other factors that come into their reviews and it usually revolves around $$$. BE it bribes or future advertising dollars.

There is no way in hell that Civ V on release deserves a score of 9.0+. Game play wise and stabability wise. If that is the case then New Vegas, Star Ruler, Elemental War of Magic and hell even Sword of the Stars II should be getting 9.0+ reviews as well.

Funny they don't and Civ V did.

Also funny is how Star Ruler was fixed properly in a short period of time while Civ V still has glaring bugs and doesn't seem very polished compared to SR.

Star Ruler? It's not as though there's much Star Ruler to polish. Also, funny you should mention a game where diplomacy is even worse than in Civ V.
It's true that Civ V got high ratings at release largely due to bearing the Civilization name, but it has since made up much of that. I'd give it an 8+ rating as it is now. Put 200 hours into that game, and most of those hours were enjoyable.

 

[boredatwork]

I think the best review was the guy on this forum who summed up Civ5 as "a wrong step in the right direction."

I still believe despite the failure of Civ5 there was nothing inherently wrong with the concept of 1UPT in a civilization title but the designers appear to have badly underestimated the amount of development work required.

Far from being "completely rewritten from the ground up to make use of the One Unit Per Tile limit on gameplay" which IMO could have produced a workable game, my impression was the reverse - it felt like they did a lazy job copy/pasting of mechanics into the existing game and expected it to work with a few tweaks. (ex doubling the movement of units for 1UPT without doubling map size and distance between cities, WTH???) When it didn't they were already trapped on the path and had little choice but to butcher the rest of the game in the hope that tweaking some numbers here or there might somehow "fix" their half assed design.

 

[Lance of Llanwy]

I think the best review was the guy on this forum who summed up Civ5 as "a wrong step in the right direction."

I still believe despite the failure of Civ5 there was nothing inherently wrong with the concept of 1UPT in a civilization title but the designers appear to have badly underestimated the amount of development work required.

Far from being "completely rewritten from the ground up to make use of the One Unit Per Tile limit on gameplay" which IMO could have produced a workable game, my impression was the reverse - it felt like they did a lazy job copy/pasting of mechanics into the existing game and expected it to work with a few tweaks. (ex doubling the movement of units for 1UPT without doubling map size and distance between cities, WTH???) When it didn't they were already trapped on the path and had little choice but to butcher the rest of the game in the hope that tweaking some numbers here or there might somehow "fix" their half assed design.

Yeah, this rings true to me. They had this grand vision of what the game should be, but flubbed it, ran out of time, and released the game as a mess.
In the interest of full disclosure, I did not buy the game until this past January, so I never experienced it at its worst. However, I was ready to move on from Civ IV. I put hundreds upon hundreds of hours into it, and hexes and no more stacks and a more tactical battle system are a breathe of fresh air.
I dearly hope this game does end up getting an expansion, because then it could truly fulfill its potential.

 

[bcaiko]

If they were not bought/bribed/co-ereced into giving awsome reviews, then I will buy the explanation of they want 2K's advertising $$$ for the future, so treated Civ V with "kids glove".

Is 2K so powerful in the industry that they could have such pull? I doubt it. If this were an industry giant like EA, maybe I'd at least listen to your arguement, though it's wholly unsupported by evidence. And even then, large companies like Nintendo or EA get scolded by game reviewers all the time. (Randomly...did Zero Punctuation ever review CivV? I'd guess not, as it's not really his kind of game..)

In the end, game reviews are subjective, and it's hard to compare a game like CivV to something like Fallout: NV. They're just too different. CivV earned the scores it did because in the time that the reviewers had with the game, it seemed like a lot of fun. And even now, it's only when you are really good at the game (or try to play the game in multiplayer), that you notice some of the game's more annoying flaws.

 

[Xiao Xiong]

I held off buying the game until it was available at a steep discount on Steam. By that time it had been heavily patched, and since then I have had fun playing it. Still there are some annoying bugs, like tile problems on captured cities.

 

[Ruler]

Reviewers are not the main problem. The main problem is that gaming now is an industry of entertainment. It needs to appeal to large amounts of people. Many of you can remember the days when gaming was something about you and your friends. When you could come over to your friends house and turn that PC(or Amiga or any other early version) or a gaming console. I moved to PC from consoles and i still have a lot of great memories about those games. And i still play them today on an emulator.
Nowadays everyone has access to gaming. But not a lot of people can adapt to old school gameplay. That is why Wii is so popular. Casual cancer at it's finest. There are great games on it but for the most part it's something that even the most desperate housewives can play. And that = $$$
Dumbing down is a priority. Things like health regeneration is shooters, less complex strategy games, graphics > gameplay. Take a big name from the past(X-COM, Syndicate), turn it into a FPS and people will buy it.
Reviewers are part of the industry. They are getting money for talking about games. There are a few that rely MOSTLY on selling magazines(PCgamer for example) but every else...how do they get money for food, rent and all those games? The most corrupt by far is gametrailers dot com. They should be ignored.
Good review + ads on that review site = good sales. Idiots rely on reviews "because reviewers are professionals who know everything about gaming".

In my country they get just free games. I know two IRL, both of them are just gamers but still has other work too. So "part of the industry" is wrong, industry just uses them as marketting tool, Im sure no dev ever gives a damn about reviewers, but when first competitor step in the ring, that sure increase their heart beat. Devs probably relealize if the game is good when its actually getting ready so dont need some kids to tell them that.

 

[glider1]

I think with the dumbing down argument about gaming, it's perfectly true in the sense that developers try to reach the biggest audience, and since there is limited computer science human resource out there, the resource get's swallowed up on trivial games that are throw away consumer trash, and not thought through properly........But you have to remember that the computer science human resource is just that, first of all human. There will be developers out there who have had it programming the rubbish dumbed down games. They have a personal code of conduct which means they will be prepared to take a pay cut to work on a decent game....

Therefore, there will always be a game for us die hard Civfanatics to play somewhere out there in the big wide world of gaming, thanks to a small but dedicated bunch of talented developers who do it for the love and the money (just less money more love). It's just that the companies we remember and the game titles we remember may change, but other companies will emerge and other truly great games will too.

For example, take Paradox games and Magnus Mundi coming out in January. That game is real quality in a strategic sense (based on EUIII) perfect for us Civfanatics but just a little dated technologically. Now all Paradox has to do is to extend the concept intelligently and thoughtfully in future iterations, and they will become the new defacto Civilization company! Firaxis do not hold the torch forever unless they want to. It's in their hands now but for how long?

So hang in there, there will be a quality gaming hobby for us out there, but never rely on the spin. That's the lesson with Civ5. Civilization 5 was a pretty good game because it did give us a 100 hours or so of interest, but the concept was cocked up so badly in a bubble of unreality about the AI and 1UPT and thus it's shelf life was very limited dragged on by the promise of DLC's and other hopes. The civing hobby is temporarily dead in the water now.

I do have to say one thing. In some sense we Civfanatics are a bit hypocritical. This is because we want everything! We want the best and latest graphics. We want all the eye candy and we want the absolute state of the art strategy game that is totally moddable. But we cannot have it all because we are such a small market! We are hypocritical because we complain about the lack of depth of the game play, but if Civ5 would have had graphics at the quality just a bit better than Civ4, we would have been complaining about that!

So unfortunately the trend is always on eye-candy first, then depth of game play second. It's the unfortunate reality of us humans that we tend to be attracted to surface appearances absolutely no different than a moth to the porch light.

Cheers

 

[Ruler]

As some who's been around for long long time knows, Matrixgames, Battlefront were all pushed away. I remember time when people used to review games like Steel Panther, Combat Mission 2 etc. Im totally happy Civ 5 was still old good Civ not some simple RTS/shooter/MMORPG.