Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Like a lot of other people who’ve commented, I’ve been a Civ fanatic for a couple of decades; It’s the one game I come back to time and time again. Every time we’ve gone through a transition of versions there’s always a bit of bedding in time and adjustment to the new way of doing things that takes time and patience. I was pretty excited to see a new version coming out – there were lots of things that looked interesting. Lots of new things to figure out, new civilizations, new city planning, new tech new diplomacy, all sorts of goodies to get my teeth into and start playing with. I downloaded through Steam on Day 1 – unlike some others, I’ve had no problems at all getting it to load and run; all seems very smooth to set up. The problem, and the reason for the 2 star rating? This game is boring! Now, I know, strategy games never have the same heart pounding effects that shooters can have, but recall that I have thousands of hours invested this type of game already…I don’t mean it’s boring in relation to fast paced games, I mean it’s boring for a strategy game. Most of the apparent dullness comes from the very slow pace of the game – all the little cutesy animations as the units move are amusing for the first 10 turns, and then one is hunting in the menus to turn animations off. Same with interacting with other players/AI – the little gestures / shrugs / finger wagging etc., get very repetitive after the first couple of goes around, and I found myself mashing the Esc key to just make them go away. Personally, the graphics aren’t to my taste – the big eyed cute cartoony style is just one that I don’t enjoy, and it doesn’t really suit the game. It’s almost like the designers were thinking ‘wow, we have this big complicated game, full of strategic nuances, how can we make it appealing to children’. It seems to me to be rather visually jarring, and certainly didn’t appeal to my demographic (I’m old enough to have been playing Civilization for a couple of decades). The fog / unexposed map doesn’t work well for me either – becomes a chore every turn of exploring to work out where your explorers have been, and where to send them next. Making the unexplored areas and the fog of war areas the same color just seemed unnecessary. I tend to play as a warmonger type, I just enjoy that aspect, and the combat in VI is far less enjoyable than V. The animations are too long, and don’t lend anything to resolution – as an example in a carrier air strike, every plane takes off away from the target, and turns to fly back to the target – that’s about 2 secs of wasted animation every single time you use a plane. Every other sprite has something like this. The balance seems a little off as well – two examples. I was at war with another player, and was moving a fleet across the ocean to attack his city, when I came across one of his land units, embarked. Obviously, he wanted to hit me first. I had a fleet of battleships (stack of 3), a submarine, and an aircraft carrier with two jet fighters. With constant attacking it took me several turns of all of that firepower to sink the unit. The land unit was an APC type thing. One would imagine that no matter how tough the APC would be on land, when assaulted at sea by a decent fleet, it should have been sunk pretty easily. Don’t care about attack stats, the embarked land unit should have been at a significant domain penalty. In another instance of the same war, one of my rangers (like a late game explorer) got caught in the open by a modern armor. Should have been game over for the ranger, but it managed to hold out for 3 turns of being assaulted until I could get reinforcements in. That’s ludicrous; Davy Crocket vs an Abrams is only going one way. I couldn’t tell for sure whether this next part was a glitch, or by design, but I found the game very jumpy while moving from task to task. I.e. I’d be in the middle of a combat phase, complete using a unit, and would jump to building in a city. Or I’d complete using a unit, it would jump to the next unit, and just as I’m thinking about what to do with that unit, zip off to do some other task – all seemed very disjointed. The spy system seems quite interesting, although at least in the game I played it would appear as though you need a huge amount of counter surveillance, as on several occasion my counterspy caught and killed theirs, but my district was destroyed anyway, and I wasn’t getting any Causes Belli so that I could go and teach the miscreant some sort of lesson. Which brings up my last point, warmonger penalties are as stupid and in some ways worse than in V. At one point during industrial age, one of my neighbors stacked 15+ units on my border, blocking routes between two of my cities, and generally interfering with all my civilians. We had a quick little war where I cleaned out the campers, and didn’t even approach a single one of his cities. Every other civilization immediately moved to being hostile. Hundred or so turns later, they’re still mostly hostile because of warmongering. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve a little pain, I did start the fight; but to have a hundred turns of diplomatic disaster for doing the same sort of things that every other Civ was doing to each other, seems like player 1 was being unfairly punished. Bottom line: While there’s some interesting developments in Civ VI, ultimately its flaws make it just not very engaging. I am just about to complete a game, and I don’t feel any compulsion to start another. For a franchise that’s always had an incredible “just one more turn” appeal, that’s a rather astonishing fall from greatness.