"Dave's Long Lost Brother"

We all have those games that we miss the first time around. With the busy release schedule of modern gaming, no one has time to play everything. That is why we at WingDamage present to you “Fashionably Late Reviews“. This is our series on games from the current generation of consoles that we may have missed on their initial release, but have gone back to experience now.

“Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution” takes one of the most complex and revered franchises in PC history, cuts out a ton of details, and somehow manages to make one of the best strategy games to ever appear on consoles.

The Civilization games have long been a staple of PC gaming. Attempts have been made to port the series over to consoles before, but it never really worked. On PC the Civ games are very complex and full of all kinds of micromanagement details that just don’t translate well to consoles. Civ always seemed like the kind of game that was just too unwieldy and complex for controllers. You really needed the extra controls that a mouse and keyboard offer.

Civ Rev overcomes these issues by streamlining a lot of the micromanagement and extraneous details. Instead of the days it takes to win at PC Civ, you can usually finish a game in a couple of hours. Most of the little sliders from the PC Civ games are gone, and a lot of the options for units have been cut out. Where you might have 12 different types of foot soldiers in Civ IV, Civ Rev will only have 4.

The nice thing is, that by trimming out much of the fat, all that is left is the delicious meat of the game. You are able to spend a lot more time strategizing, and a lot less time worrying about minute details. For a lot of purists, that might sound like a horrible idea. But the truth is, what is left is a blast to play.

What I have always liked about Civ is that a military victory is not the only way to win. It is possible to win by having the dominant culture, or dominating economically, or technologically. Each of these goals has definite advantages and disadvantages. Focus too much on one aspect, and someone will take advantage of your weakness. If you ignore technology, you might find yourself with a bunch of spear-men going up against machine guns. It is a joy to try to figure out the best ways to win, and there is no set path to a guaranteed victory.

The goal of the game is pretty much the same as it has always been. You are still taking control of a small town and growing it into a world power through the march of history. Gameplay is similar to its older brothers on the PC in that everything is turn based. The ways in which you can achieve victory are similar as well, although these too are simplified to some extent.

For example: In Civ 4, a cultural victory requires you to be the president of the UN, and you have to have other rulers vote to pass all sorts of resolutions. In Civ Rev, you only have to have 20 Great People come live in your civilization and then build the U.N. So, instead of screaming as India fails to pass an antislavery bill for the 14th time, you can cackle maniacally as your culture dominates.

I like to play as Gandhi, and just annihilate everyone militarily. There are few things in life sweeter than Gandhi dropping a nuclear bomb on a city and sending it back to the stone age.

I have never been a fan of numeric scores so I give “Civilization Revolution” a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0eKnhZufow

Tags: Civ Rev, Civilization Revolution, Fashionably Late Reviews, Ghandi, ps3, Sid Meier, Sim, strategy, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.