Honestly, I can't think of anything positive about it.
This appears to be the worst Civilization release ever.
They could have done something like take Civ4 BTS, reworked it for hexes, and given it a massive graphical update (along the lines of the more realistic art style of Civ5, but newer, not along the lines of the Civ6 cartoon art style) and I would have been overjoyed.
This? This is just utter nonsense. Everything from the weird morphing into different civs, to the "leaders" who were never world leaders in history.
I have bought every Civilization after the first one in 1991 at launch (not going to lie, I got the first one while swapping floppies as a kid, before I realized the error of my ways) and then proceeded to buy every DLC for them (well, at least the major overhauls and all the added civs).
I have thousands of hours and hundreds of dollars sunk into Civ franchise games at this point. I was very active in the old 2k Games forums when Civ5 launched when people were complaining about how heavy Civ5 was (and accusing it of killing their aging Geforce 9800GT's) dispelling hardware failure myths and helping people figure out which upgrades they needed to make Civ5 run well.
The Civilization franchise has for a long long time been one of my very few "must buy at launch" franchises.
But I have to be honest, I have absolutely no interest what so ever in this game. Maybe I'll buy it some day on sale just to test it if it ever drops down to the $10 level, but that is about it.
This game would be better off if it were erased from development, and they started over again from scratch.
Like, I understand that they are in a difficult position. They have to come up with something new, or the game gets really old over time, but at the same time, if they mess with it too much, they hurt the legacy of the franchise. That is clearly not an easy position to be in.
But this? This pisses all over Sid Meier's legacy, IMHO. Yes, I know he was in the promo video. I wonder how much they paid him for that.
