It does what it does do very well, with cheer, with accessibility and really very prettily, which is why discovering that, upon feeling you've gotten your head around it, there isn't much left to experiment with is so disappointing. You'll have researched every technology, built every unit, achieved every type of victory and conceived of every strategy. While becoming really good at the game will take some time, the array of possible options and outcomes are almost all revealed after just two or three 1-3 hour sessions. It's not 'too small compared to Civ IV' it's just too small. As I suspected in the last preview, the game's too small.
Which is a little at odds with Civ Rev's biggest failing. The early game is spent picking on aggressive but puny barbarian villages - a good source of unit experience and bonus cash. For a lot of people, it may not be stupid enough, even. You'll learn the interface, you'll memorise the rock-paper-scissors of which units are best against which units, you'll twig that you need to manually shift cities' economies to focus on growth, production, science or cash as the situation requires.Īnd you'll learn this only by having an attentive mind over the course of several games. If you don't have some idea of how you're intending to deal with them, you won't get anywhere. The world is small and your rivals few but ever-present. If anything, there's far more focus on having a master plan from the very start than in the bigger Civs.
Often, I started feeling sorry for my rivals as, faced with a tank army smashing through their hopeless horsemen, they begged and begged me to let them live, pathetically offering up the last scraps of gold they had.
There's plenty to think about, and you're viscerally rewarded for doing so. My concern is that its audience doesn't in fact exist, that it's an unnatural middle-ground between veteran Civ players and folk who run screaming from the very concept. This isn't 'dumbed-down', as is the knee-jerk protestation of elitists, but there's no escaping that it's been made for a completely different audience to the usual Civ crowd. That's why it's so fast, that's why there's so much emphasis on combat, that's why trade and diplomacy are all but absent.
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