Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First I'd like to say that I'm a long time Civilization fan, and as such this review will be comparing Civilization 5 to the previous iterations of the game. If you are new to the Civilization world and have not been exposed to any of the previous games, this review is not for you as I will be expressing very biased opinions on the improvements (or lack thereof) that Civilization 5 brings. This game is a large departure from Civilization 4...so much so that I barely even recognize it, and I'm not even sure where to begin. The graphics are vastly inferior to Civilization 4 and look quite childish, which is a shame because Civ 4 really had good things going for it in this respect. In Civ 4, when your units would walk through forests or jungles, birds would sometimes fly away from your disturbance. This doesn't happen in Civ 5. Coming from Civ 4, I'd even say the graphics for Civ 5 are down right ugly. All the trees look the same and all of the different tile sets for deserts, flood plains, tundra, etc. look like the developers hired the cheapest artist they could find to draw everything. Even the rivers are so bland looking there were a couple of times I mistook them to be border outlines for whichever computer player was blue in color. The wheat fields are especially awful as they look like some kid scribbled yellow/gold on the tile. I even had to double check that I had turned all of the graphics options to the highest level. Another aspect that bugged me was that you can't zoom in very much to view any real detail of your cities or anything else. In Civ 4 you could zoom in quite close and view a lot of detail of your units, cities, and the beautiful terrain. But not in Civ 5. Perhaps it's better this way since everything looks so bad to begin with. Also in Civ 4, when you moved your units their footsteps would make different sounds depending on the type of terrain you were in. If you were in a flood plain or other marshy tile, the footsteps would have a squishy sound. If you were in a glasslands or hill tile, the footsteps would have a thumping sound. You would also be able to see actual footprints from your legged units on most terrain when they moved. All of this doesn't hardly occur at all in Civ 5. Whenever you completed building a world wonder in Civ 4, you would be shown a short video of the wonder being constructed to completion. It was quite a nice reward for spending so much time trying to complete such a large project. This doesn't happen in Civ 5. Instead you are only shown a still picture of the wonder. It's almost as if the developers wanted you to think that wonders are nothing to get excited about. I definitely started to feel that way after building my first couple of wonders. They also don't give you as much of a bonus in Civ 5 either, so I found myself not even wanting to build them anymore and instead focus on building military units. Which brings me to another gripe. Even if you have a strong army, it's nearly impossible to take a city. Your military units get bombarded as they approach and it's DEVASTATING! Even when you get close enough to attack, cities are extremely strong and WILL KILL most of your attacking units. And since you can't stack units anymore (only one unit per tile, unless you have a Great General which are extremely rare to come by) it's a major pain to mount any kind of attack on even the weakest city. I suppose this is good in certain ways if you aren't a war-monger, but it was VERY annoying for me as I like to expand my empire by taking over others. The hex tiles are a little annoying also, but that's just because I've been used to squares for so long. The problem isn't really hex tiles per se, but hex tiles plus the one-unit-per-tile restriction. It's not so bad until you are trying to move military units around. It gets to be quite cumbersome if you have more than 3 or 4 military units that you are trying to get to the same general area. To me, this is the main reason why someone would stop trying to win the game by destroying all other factions and just try to win a cultural or space race victory. I also wish religion hadn't been taken away. This is just personal preference of course, but I found it fun to just take break from everything else for 30-40 turns and crank out a bunch of missionaries to spread Christianity all over the world. It's not all bad though...there are some good things about Civ 5. Most of the units that could only move one tile per turn in previous games (warriors, archers, etc.) can now move two, so exploration goes a little faster. Also, a single unit now contains multiple persons. So a single archer unit shows as about 10 individual archers, and when they are attacked some of the archers die off. So if your archer unit only has 5 archer persons in it you know right away that it is at half strength. I also liked the new Social Policies, which allow you to specialize in a certain aspect of culture. For instance, you can specialize in Liberty which gives your civilization growth bonuses due to your now inherently ingrained sense of freedom. There are further "power-ups" within the Liberty policy that you can use to enhance the social policy, thus giving your civilization further "buffs" in that area. City States are a nice addition I suppose. They are just single city factions that don't ever expand. You can take them over or befriend them, and if you go with the latter choice they will offer you rewards for your friendship if you nurse them by offering them gifts of gold or protecting them from barbarians. Helping them earns you "influence" points with the City State faction, but those points slowly fade away if you don't keep doing things for them. The opening cinematic is done quite well, but it kind of seems out of place as you don't get any more cinematics throughout the game. Maybe you get to see different cinematics after winning each respective victory condition (cultural, space race, diplomatic, etc.), but I honestly couldn't see myself playing that far in this game. The user interface is quite simplistic, which I suppose is a good thing for newcomers to the game. However, I found it to cover too much of the screen and it got in my way too often. If there were options to collapse different aspects of the user interface it wouldn't be so bad, but I couldn't find any such options and as such, I felt the user interface for Civ 4 was much cleaner and drastically more useful than in Civ 5, in addition to taking up less space. Overall Civ 5 is a major disappointment, and I urge anyone who loves Civ 4 or any of the previous iterations of Civilization to stay away from this game. It disappoints on almost every level and the few improvements that were made aren't worth the the annoyances and deficiencies of almost every other aspect of the game. The low quality of the graphics is inexcusable for the year 2010, especially considering the recommended system requirements tout DirectX 10/11 support. The gameplay just simply isn't fun, feels empty and watered down, and you don't even get a printed manual. If you've never played a Civilization game before you might be able to enjoy this one, however I would still recommend that you pick up Civ 4 instead as it provides a much more enjoyable experience. In addition, this game requires that you install Steam which in turn requires Internet activation. What this really means is that you'll never own this game and will only be able to play it as long as Steam allows you to, all while not guaranteeing the ability to access your games. The following quotes are selections from the Steam Subscriber Agreement: "The Entire Risk Arising Out Of Use Or Performance Of Steam...Remains With You, The User. Valve Expressly Disclaims (I) Any Warranty For Steam...Including Duties Of Lack Of Negligence And Lack Of Workmanlike Effort." "Neither Valve, Its Licensors, Nor Their Affiliates Shall Be Liable In Any Way For Loss Or Damage Of Any Kind Resulting From The Use Or Inability To Use Steam, Your Account, Your Subscriptions And The Software...EVEN IF VALVE HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES." "Valve Does Not Guarantee Continuous, Error-Free, Virus-Free Or Secure Operation And Access To Steam, The Software, Your Account And/Or Your Subscriptions(s)." So basically if you use Steam, Valve (the creators of Steam) can do whatever they want, including breaking Steam (thus breaking your ability to play your purchased games) or even breaking your computer at any time and even on purpose, and you can't do anything about it.