"Ok, this is last turn, I promise, and this is the last time I promise, I promise, really."

When I first played Civilization II I thought it was one of the biggest craps ever, at that time I was obsessed with real time strategy games like Command & Conquer, and Civilization II was something extremely confusing that had nothing to do with the things I was used to, it was a turn based strategy game, that means every unit has turns, something that makes the game slower, then everything was full of options, windows full of weird symbols, and lot more confusing things, so after playing for while I decided to quit because I got bored.

A few years later, one day I was so bored that I decided to give the game another chance, because it was taken as one of the greatest game of all time, so I thought, “at least something good it has to have”. I took me nothing less than a whole year to learn how to play the damned game (I didn’t even had the instruction booklet because I borrowed the game from a friend) but man, it was one of the greatest experiences I ever had.

Gameplay:
Normally there are two ways to beat Civilization II, defeating all the enemies (which is certainly NOT a good idea unless you are playing against one empire only), or by sending a spacecraft to the outer space. After doing a lot of customization (selecting our empire, the size of the world, enemies, and a lot more tings) the will began, we will be given a couple of settlers and an immense world to explore, then our next task will be to find a good place to build a city, we can’t just place it in the first place we see, we have to see if there are goods around or later in the game that city will be useless. Then we will have to expand building more cities, establishing trade routes, farms, interconnecting your cities by building roads and railroad, and a very big etc. We will have to explore, make alliances with other nations, trade with them, and one of the most important things, make discoveries, these discoveries (things like The Wheel, The Gunpowder, etc) will help us to advance from the prehistoric era in which we begin, to a semi futuristic world, full of contamination, machines, and corruption. There are some discoveries that can only be obtained by one empire, The Great Wall, The United Nations... these special discoveries will give us very valuable bonus, so we have to try to get them as soon as possible.

Maintaining our cities is an extremely complicated task, maybe extremely is still not enough to explain how complicated it is, after having played for more than a year I still don’t know exactly how they work.

This is just an extremely brief explanation about how the game works, there are so many features and details that would be impossible to describe them all.

But Civilization II isn’t perfect, it has a lot of problems, at the beginning you won’t notice because you’ll be trying to figure out where to place your next railroad, but there’s plenty of them. For example, all the civilization are basically the same, they don’t have any special skill or anything, they should have had something like in Age of Empires, where some empires were more skilled cutting wood while some others were better mining gold.
Also, sometimes you’ll run out of money without knowing why, or the population will suddenly start to decrease without any reason, and the same will happen with the rest of your resources and cities.
Later in the game, when you create a unit in one of your cities, that city will start to produce almost noting, it will also become smaller and basically useless, why?, I don’t know, and it’s something extremely annoying.
One of the biggest problems is that you have to wait for the enemy to finish it’s turn, and you’ll have to wait for every single enemy unit the enemy has, if you enemy has one hundred units you’ll have to wait for one hundred turns (and some units have two or three turns), and if you are playing against seven empires at the same time that makes more than seven hundred units, or what’s the same, seven hundred turns. At the beginning this isn’t a problem, but later it becomes a real pain.

But all of that is not important, Civilization II is so insanely addictive, you’ll be playing for such a long time that suddenly you’ll realize that you haven’t eaten anything, you stink because you haven’t taken a bath, and that it’s almost time to go to work/school/university and you are still trying to make an agreement with Cleopatra while discovering the gun powder and fighting with a bunch of barbarian hordes, and everything at the same time.

Graphics and Music:
Graphically Civilization II is very attractive for people like me, who loves old school graphics, and simply nauseating for everyone else. Anyway, the graphics were dated even for its time, very pixilated and simple (yet quite detailed). We have a City Council to help up take some decision during the game, this Council is played by real actors, and they simply rule, they are funny as hell and the actor play their roles perfectly, including them was an excellent idea. The music is horrible, very weird and annoying. In the other hand the sound is pretty good, most of the units have their our particular sound, and they sound great.

As a result:
Civilizations II is an extremely complicated and slow game, the learning curve is tremendously long, and you have to keep in mind that if you really want to enjoy this game you’ll have to be very, very patient. But at the end you’ll be rewarded, rewarded with some of the most fascinating hours of you life as a video game player, and I’m not exaggerating.

”My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry about that.”

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 08/11/03, Updated 02/14/04