Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution

"Not as much as expected, but addictive nonetheless."

Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution is a remake of the classical Civilization games updated for the next generation systems. If you have played the older Civilization games, there will be many recognizable features. The overall game concept has not changed, for instance. You begin the game with a settler that can found your civilization at 4000 BC. As you grow your civilization you learn new technologies by devoting resources to science output. Learning new technologies unlocks new military units, buildings that provide certain benefits to your cities, and Wonders of the World. There will be other civilizations that you will encounter that you can wage war against or attempt to work with for mutual benefit. The goal is to reach one of four types of victory. CONQUEST victory occurs by destroying every other civilization, SCIENCE victory occurs by building a space ship to send to colonize an extrasolar planet. The other two victories may not be as familiar to fans of the original Civilization. CULTURAL victory occurs by building the United Nations once a certain cultural milestone has been reached. This deviates from the role of the United Nations wonder in previous games. Similarly, an ECONOMIC victory occurs by building the World Bank wonder once a certain economic milestone has been reached. If you have played a Civilization game before, you will have no problem getting the hang of this game.

Although the game is nearly as addictive as the previous civilization games, I found there to be several disappointments. First, this game was hyped to be a reworking of the Civilization games, rebuilt from the ground up. I expected a totally different game that only maintained the same central theme, when in fact there are only a handful of changes between the previous Civ games and this one. Most of the differences actually seemed to be a reduction of content when compared to the previous installments. There are no preset maps, so you cannot play on a map that actually looks like earth, or Europe, or things like that. Every map is randomly generated.

The other major disappointment was the graphics. The graphics in the city scenes are amazing! You just never get to appreciate it. The cities on the world map zip by so fast during game play that you never really get to see what's going on. Inside the city, things are so crowded that you can't really see the buildings and wonders unless you take a break from playing and put your face up to the television. So, it's not that the graphics are bad, they are simply under-utilized. Most of the game will be spent without noticing any graphical improvement over last-gen consoles because of this.

If you have never played a Civilization game, this game is still definitely worth getting. If you have kept up with the Civ series, this is not a bad addition, especially if you've missed some of the later installments. There is a lot of unlockable content that can keep you glued to the game, working on getting every victory type with every civilization and hoping to get the right Great People to make appearances.

Because after one or two playthroughs most of the fun comes from unlocking content, I would strongly recommend against renting this game. If you are interested in the game, definitely buy it. Although it did not live up to my expectations, I'm still glad that I own it.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/18/09

Game Release: Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution (US, 07/08/08)