At least this game sort of makes you feel like it.
Prepare to have your life consumed by fictional society, yet again, akin to the Sims or any other simulator game that has consumed hours and hours of your life. Can anyone guess what we're simulating this time?
If you guessed Civilization, you will receive absolutely nothing in your email shortly.
So here's the deal. You are giving an ancient society. Incan, Celtic, Carthaginian etc. Your job, is to lead them to utter domination of the world. The cool piece is, you choose the way to dominate the world. You can win in 5 different ways:
Cultural Victory-Be Culturally awesome and nice to your people.
This boys and girls is known as sarcasm.
Domination-Military victory by capturing all other capitals
Lul Jokes
Science-Be the first to send parts to space.
Time-2050 is the final year to run your Civilization. In other words if your society is "ahead" at this point you win
I had never played before but constantly saw friends spending hour upon hour in the game. When the Steam Summer Sale offered up the game and most of its DLC for a great price, I decided to pounce.
What I found? A great, well constructed thats extremely addictive. I booted up a tutorial and began to play as the random Celtic Civilization. You have different units like settlers, workers, warriors, and so on to help you function in this fictional earth. The Carthaginians and I were in a race to rule the world!
After 15 hours of gameplay: I gave up.
I had gotten bored of waiting to for science or culture wins, so I started trying to bomb every city until I owned every piece of land. After surrounding a city, nuking it, (sacrificing my own troops in the process) the fuckers still wouldnt give up. My computer declared a mercy rule and decided to freeze on me so I'd be forced to quit torturing the citizens of Hanoi.
First of all, a nuke should automatically make a city give up. Secondly, why in the hell did the tutorial not feature a save?
Lets try this game again, with the real gameplay and a save feature this time! Not realizing there'd be no character select screen (you have to pick in the options before starting a game), I ended up as Korea. And proceeded to play 9 more hours of the same thing before winning a science victory (which could've come loads sooner if I had realized my last piece couldn't reach the capital because some asshole workers were on that tile) 7 other societies and I were competing..and they were constantly coming to me. Begging for money, food, open borders...Etc. I did have the AI set on noob mode but still, it seemed a little too simple.
There's some greatness here. The history is accurate (as far as I know) and real leaders of civilizations are recreated for you to cut deals with. Little details like hills or jungle affecting combat or cities asking for resources and celebrating when you acquire them bring a deep strategy element. The idea of building society from the ground up and controlling every little minute detail is cool. The game progression does leave you saying "OK what's next?"
But who the fuck has 9 hours to play 1 round of a game?
Yes I realize you can save, or go into "quick" mode etc., but if I'm booting a game up, 95% of the time I'm playing for an hour or two until something better I have to do. While we've all had those gaming marathon days, what's going to bring me back to this?
I'm not writing it off. I probably need to delve deeper, up the AI Difficulty, and really dive in, but I have no idea when I'll have time to do that. Tell me this game is for hardcore players only. Tell me "thats what tutorial and noob mode are for." But if your game is this inaccessible to pick up for a "little while", its going to suffer.
Overall, I WANT to like Civilization V. Its such a cool idea, and really different from anything I've ever played before. The closest thing I've gotten to strategy games so some Jurassic Park version of Command and Conquer (that was cool as shit by the way. After I beat it legitimately, I used cheat codes for t-rexes on the first level and proceed to decimate the baddies), so this is something refreshing for me. But the sheer length of the games and the inaccessibility of those new to the genre or series, take this one down a peg. Give it a look the next time its on sale though, Its worth a chance.
Stand Back, I'm going to try science!
-Oz
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