mdlake.net

I got a chance to try the demo version of Civilization Revolution on my soon-to-be-brother-in-law(once removed)’s console a couple days ago. So instead of half-baked expectations based on what I’ve read, I now have half-baked opinions based on a demo. Progress!

It’s…okay. Slightly better than I expected, but only slightly. The reviews are right to call it candy-coated; it’s definitely smaller, faster, and more vibrantly colored than most of the Civ line. The lack of game options bleeds out some of the repeat play value: no experimenting with map sizes and terrain types. Fans of large maps will be disappointed: there is little room to build a sprawling empire, and you’ll have to make do with a few, high-powered cities. Tightly-packed as you are, hostilities begin immediately; I received news that the Zulus had wiped out the Egyptians before I had met my second neighbor. You zip right up the tech tree, too.

Altogether, the game plays like Civ for short attention spans. There’s no sense of an era passing upon the discovery of the railroad when you just discovered gunpowder five minutes ago, and feudalism five minutes before that. There’s no slow expansion into marginal lands, no quiet exploration of your immediate surroundings, just a quick plunge into border disputes. The colors are more appropriate for Pac-Man than for the administration of an ancient and noble empire. Small bonus achievements abound: you get a new unit or a culture bonus or free cash every time you’re the first person to discover a given tech, or every time your treasury reaches a new level, or every time you successfully press the “X” button. Cartoon “advisors” continually pop up to announce these minute-by-minute bonuses, along with every other game development, or to comment on the lack of development, or just to say “hi,” in enthusiastic gibberish, obscuring the game map. Often, they come so frequently that they have to push one another (or even their own duplicates) aside to make their announcements. Endless praise and special rewards betray an attempt to capture the kids’ market and harm the epic sweep of Civ, although I expect you can turn off the in-your-face advisors in the full version of the game.

Despite lacking the gravitas of its brethren, CivRev still works just fine, mostly. (The substitution of the cumbersome joystick apparatus for a mouse, while unavoidable, is still regrettable.) I, for one, often play small, fast games on my computer, because the micromanagement required for a successful empire at medium-to-high difficulty gets tiresome long before the game is effectively over, and even longer before it ends officially. I know I represent a marginal minority on this—Civ fans continually ask for more slightly-differentiated units, larger maps, more technologies—but for Civ as a game, and not an exercise in grinding micromanagement, small can be beautiful.

And CivRev gets some things right, too, or at least intriguing. I refer specifically to the absence of workers crawling the countryside, building roads and farms and quarries and all the other terrain features necessary to exploit your natural resources. In their place are buildings: granaries raise the food output of the plains, for example, without a need for a worker digging irrigation ditches across the map. I rather miss the worker, and many devoted Civ fans will too, but their removal means the removal of a lot of micromanagement, too. What seems to have started as a design feature intended to conserve on memory ends up looking like clever streamlining.

Other changes, again possibly motivated by a desire to conserve memory, are less welcome. The small maps leave no room for a fair spread of strategic resources, so special resources have regressed to providing mere production bonuses (extra food, construction, or trade) as they did in Civ2. International rade vanishes along with strategic resources. Units once again block one another’s passage, even for players at peace. Religion, corporations, and anything analogous to that sort of cultural infiltration have been removed. Cultural borders remain, although they didn’t seem to do much. It’s hard to tell when “culture” also seems to have supplanted “happiness” as a cap on how many workers a city can support. The inclusion of three-unit “armies” are redundant, and the concealment of enemy units within cities is just plain annoying. (“Oh, it looks like they had thirty tank divisions. I thought they only had two archer companies. Silly me. Maybe they were hiding behind the granary.”)

In short, CivRev is just what you’d expect: a simpler version of Civ, with lots of sparkly bits bursting needlessly across the screen. Sometimes, the simplifications come across as streamlining a game that can bog down in detail, but other times, they just dumb down the experience. CivRev jumbles up the formula just enough to tempt me to explore its variations.

But I won’t. That damned joystick, and endless diddling around, trying to get the cursor to the right space, is a deal-breaker, more trouble than it’s worth.