Civilization VI Review
Developer: Firaxis Games
Publisher: 2K Games
Platform Reviewed: PC
Release Date: October 21, 2016
Acquired via: Purchase by Reviewer
This review is a bit late. I blame real life for being the unbending, cruel mistress she is. And I blame this game for making me want to ignore real life.
It all started at 10 PM one day. I had launched Civilization VI with the aim of quickly trying it out. This was a fool’s errand; I am a sucker for strategy and sim games, and I have been smitten with the Civilization series since the first entry I played, part II. Still, the prospect of working the next day gave me confidence in that I wouldn’t be able to play the game for too long before the need for sleep pulled me away. I hit “Create Game”, kept my difficulty at “Prince”, picked ol’ Teddy Roosevelt as my leader of choice (‘MURICA!), and waited for the game to load.
Ten hours later, I was working on my excuse to bail on work for a day. I did not sleep, nor did I attempt to justify my need for sleep despite my puffy eyes. Sleep did not matter. What DID matter was finally placing Teddy’s boot firmly on Gandhi’s neck.
Firaxis’s Civilization VI is by no means a perfect game. Spoiler alert: the AI is all over the place, seeming as random as my luck with women. The win conditions also seem to be nebulous; how can I work towards a Culture win if I can’t evolve the fucking thing? But when it fires on all cylinders, Civilization VI is as engrossing as its immediate predecessor is. For world-sim fans, this game is the crack that crack smokes!
The game follows the same tack as its predecessors did. Your goal is to take a civilization from the classical age to the space age and beyond. You encounter other civilizations along the way, and you must find a way to either coexist with them or take them down.
The above paragraph is overly facile when compared to the actual game. Yes, those things all happen. But the level of subtlety, overt hostility and deft management needed to ensure your civilization survives and thrives would take hours of explanation to convey. Bottom line: if you are a strategy wonk like me, once you fire up Civilization VI, you are lost to friends and family.
Oh, and this needs to be said: GANDHI IS A DICK!!!
You start a campaign by picking a difficulty, a map size, and most importantly, a leader. The leaders span all of recorded history, from Egypt’s Cleopatra to China’s Qin Shi Huang to Sumeria’s Gilgamesh and many points in between and beyond. Each leader has his strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. Russia’s Tsar Peter respects a civilization that favors culture and art; France’s Catherine de’Medici respects a nation that employs espionage. This is important not only in how you play them, but how you play against them. Fail in your quest to further the arts and Peter will frown upon you. If you become lax in your imperial ambitions, England’s Queen Victoria will consider you a weakling, while becoming overly ambitious may incur the wrath of Greece’s Pericles, who subscribes to the, “I saw it first!” mantra.
And Gandhi is a dick. No, seriously, threaten so much as a tree and he’s going nuts on you! And he does NOT give a fuck! I think he’s worse than Aztec warchief Montezuma or Japan’s Mongol-killer Hojo Tokimune!
This dynamic is not new; Civilization IV and V worked this into their games. Here, their proclivities seem to take on new meaning. They also seem to be scattershot in their strategies. Some actions seem to make no sense at all. At one point during my first play session, Queen Victoria decided to drop a surprise declaration of war on my young republic. She had a formidable force amassed, and I had not advanced my military might as fast, so preoccupied was I in trying to appease Peter’s disgust at my ignorance of the arts. Fortunately, the terrain was on my side. I had set my initial settlement of Washington behind a mountainside. I placed my two archer units at the southern entrance to my side and picked apart the lone catapult her side brought to bear. After I peppered the solitary unit, she offered a hasty peace settlement, ignoring her numbers advantage and seeking to end hostilities before I did something as awful as flat a tire on her next unit.
The UI also has its quirks. Scout units can be set to wander off, discovering enclaves and natural wonders on their own. But as soon as one of them comes across a rival unit, they require instructions RIGHT NOW! They are incapable of evasive action on their own; you must pry your attention away from your city planning to tell them to get the hell outta Dodge. Ol’ Teddy would be ashamed; Rough Riders they are not!
Those quibbles aside, there is much to love about Civilization VI’s new interface. Cities are no longer stackable; instead of adding more structures to the city’s tile, new structures sprawl out around them. This adds a new level of strategy to city planning. Some structures need to sit alongside the capital; others require specific terrain such as like flat land, mountains, or proximity to a body of water. This makes settlement a strategic decision on its own. My decision to park Washington next to a mountain range restricted the structures I could build around it. I chose defensibility over growth with my capital.
Governance has also been overhauled. Instead of set governmental policies, you can customize your government’s direction with policy cards that modify aspects you want to focus on. Do you want to grant holy structures a bonus to adjacent structures, or do you want to sacrifice gold for productivity when building districts?
Gold also becomes a factor when amassing your civilization’s iron fist. A military can be expensive, and your capital’s coffers can quickly run dry if you produce new units with no regard. This is mitigated with the ability to create trade routes. In addition to raking in the coin needed to finance your government, trade routes can bring in goods and influence that your cities need to flourish.
The influence comes in the form of points. Those points can influence whether culture, religion, science, or military flourish. Enough accumulation of points will attract Great People. Earn enough points in science and you can attract the favor of Albert Einstein or Euclid. An abundance of points in writing, meanwhile, can earn notice from William Shakespeare or Li Bai. These Great People endow your civilization with great prestige or advantage, assuming one of your cities houses a structure they can use to channel their muse.
There are many small factors that intertwine together to form the foundation of Civilization VI. And when these factors are humming, the hours can fly by. It is indeed amazing to experience the complete immersion that the game offers. When I dig deep in, nothing else matters. Of course, I am susceptible to this; I am in my element when I am planning and strategizing. Koei preyed on me in the 8- and 16-bit era with their strategy titles; Firaxis has done the same in the PC realm.
This is without mentioning the game’s visual and aural prowess. Everything is vivid and very detailed. The leaders are very well animated when they speak of diplomatic – or hostile – intentions. And the music is very atmospheric and almost hypnotic when one’s brain is focused on grand strategy. That is pretty much par for the course with these games. But all of that is window dressing to me. The graphical fidelity is enough that I can differential units and structures easily, and that’s all that matters.
The aforementioned UI and RNG bugs, however, keep pulling me out of the trance. It’s annoying to see myself leading in Cultural victory, only to suddenly and without reason be dropped to third just two turns later. It makes no sense to me why Pericles wants to be friendly with me so often but lapses into “YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN” bitching if my scout unit so much as grazes a city-state he covets. And I will never understand how barbarians can plunder my trade delegation when they don’t have an encampment or unit anywhere near their travel path.
In many ways, Civilization VI scratches my itch for a grand strategy game. The numerous refinements and new twists result in a game that totally engrosses me. Sooner or later, though, it will misstep and break my immersion. In a credit to the game, however, it gives me enough that I want to dip back into the well for more. Even if I lose ten hours of productivity and have to fake Zika to get out of work, I find a lot of what the game does good enough to stay with it.
Seven hours into my second day, exhaustion finally overwhelmed me. I slept. In my dreams, Teddy the Rough Rider finally put boot to neck, showing Gandhi what real humility meant. I’m sure I smiled in my sleep.
Never forget: Gandhi is a dick!
