Rock Paper Shotgun: A mostly successful effort to address major criticisms of previous Civilization games

Sid Meier's Civilization VII review

Civilization 7 offers a mostly successful attempt to address major criticisms of previous Civilization games - but with some drawbacks and terrible combat UX.

www.rockpapershotgun.com

A long time coming this one. It seems Firaxis shafted RPS and didn’t give them a preview copy.

In other words, the basic idea behind this system is to reset the game and the economy with each era change, to avoid the snowballing end-game of previous versions. And it works! It does solve that problem, but with some downsides.

In some ways, you stop identifying with a civilization, and instead identify with your leader, who persists through the ages. I played as Machiavelli, who has some advantages in diplomacy, and I generally try to avoid wars if I can. But you also tend to identify opposing AIs with their leader: Frederic the Great was a persistent pain in the butt for me, and I don’t even remember what civilizations he led (aggressive *******, though). There is an upside in that I’d bet that playing Greece-Ming-France as Harriet Tubman would be a rather different experience than the same succession as Machiavelli. In other words, diverse combinations of leaders and civilizations creates more - and more interesting - choices.

In other words, Civ 7 takes time-consuming chores from previous iterations of the game, and makes them faster. Need to command workers? No more. Need to move a bunch of troops? Easier. In other words: smart and commendable design decisions.

This makes it all the more baffling how boneheaded the combat interface is. To attack units in an adjoining hex, you select your unit, then click on the hex you want to attack. Simple, right? Nope! Did you click the “move” button first? No, so the attack doesn’t happen. Instead, you get a dialog telling you about the enemy unit.

The art in Civ 7 is fantastic. The characters you encounter in diplomacy are fully animated and respond in entirely believable ways, from “I’m skeptical” to “no, we’re at war now”. The unit animations in combat are easily read. The city graphics are obvious, and the animation cut scenes on the birth of a new Wonder are worth watching in full. Even if I think Firaxis missed the boat in some areas, their art department delivered completely. If the rest of the team delivered at this level, this would not be a mixed review.

I have to say I am a bit baffled by the combat UX criticism - I haven’t found any difficulty attacking units, with a few times needing to click twice. There are plenty of UI issues of course, but this isn’t one of them?

Other than that I think this is reasonable. I am also on board with a lot of the changes. But this was overall a less critical review than Eurogamer’s, and dealt less with the change in tone.

 

[theadder]

I have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about regarding the combat. None of the comments addressed it either, really.

 

[DeutschDachs]

I thought maybe he played on a console or something with his combat complaints, but nope... Says reviewed on PC. Maybe instead of using right click to move he's manually clicking the move to button then left clicking on units or cities? Only thing I can think of.

 

[dan-the-man278]

I agree that the combat criticisms are baffling. Maybe it's just a bit of "clicking the tile vs clicking the unit model/flag" jank, which I have experienced a little but not to this extent and not really in a combat setting. Bizarre.

As an aside, I went back and compared this review with the RPS reviews of Civ 5 and 6, and the main takeaway is what a huge decline in the depth and quality of the writing at RPS - a sign of the times I suppose!

 

[Uberfrog]

As an aside, I went back and compared this review with the RPS reviews of Civ 5 and 6, and the main takeaway is what a huge decline in the depth and quality of the writing at RPS - a sign of the times I suppose!

Yeah a lot of the best writers have left over the years, and the Gamer Network have laid off many others.

Edwin, Brendan and Sin still write good stuff.

 

[theadder]

As an aside, I went back and compared this review with the RPS reviews of Civ 5 and 6, and the main takeaway is what a huge decline in the depth and quality of the writing at RPS - a sign of the times I suppose!

I thought it was a very poor review. It seemed mostly thoughtless. The extensive combat narrative still translates to no concept in the game that I’m aware of. It’s like the reviewer was reviewing a totally different game. I’ve been reading RPS for many, many years.