Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution

Jul 7, 2008

PC gamers have long revered Sid Meier's take on simulated world-building, but those confined to consoles have had precious little contact with the turn-based strategy game that spawned the concept of "just one more turn." Heck, the closest thing 360 gamers had to Civilization was Viva Pinata, and the poor PS3 folk don't even have a bunch of candy-stuffed animals to manage, much less a sprawling kingdom of continent-spanning metropolises. Now, Civilization Revolution brings turn-based colony management to the masses, and although it's not quite as deep or nuanced as most of its PC predecessors, it does a great job of converting the gameplay experience the series is famous for while providing excellent, intuitive controls on the consoles.

Building for Tomorrow

Civilization Revolution presents the same basic goal of conquering the planet that earned this series a place in the gaming annals. You begin with a group of settlers, found a colony surrounded by a good mix of resources, and begin cranking out troops and building up fortifications as well as commercial structures or wonders. It's part SimCity with a bit of Command & Conquer thrown in for excitement, played out over centuries worth of in-game eras in such a way that you can shepherd your small group of settlers from the founding of their nation to its final culmination as one of the greatest societies in the world... or maybe you'll get crushed by the Mongols in 1050 BC. You'll guide your little people through the ages in the hopes of creating a lasting and successful civilization.

Over the millennia, you can build new cities and outfit them with the latest technological structures (researched through a simple but fairly extensive tech tree) like banks, universities, aqueducts and various other bits of environmental engineering. These buildings in turn contribute to your civilization's ability to produce the five basic commodities: production for building, food for population growth, scientific research for technological progression, culture to ensure strong borders, and gold to finance the whole enterprise.

These five commodities can be focused on to varying degrees and each individual city in your civilization can specialize in the production of one commodity or take a more balanced approach. This is where things get interesting, because Civilization Revolution offers four separate avenues to victory, so even if your civilization is impoverished and can't possibly achieve an economic victory (made possible by generating 20,000 gold and building the World Bank wonder), that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't still succeed through a technological victory (earned by researching Space Flight and sending a colony ship to Alpha Centauri). PC veterans should instantly recognize these win conditions, as most have been present in the franchise since its first sequel, Civilization 2.

Swords to Plowshares

Of course, the tried-and-true method of complete and utter military dominance is always available, and should you capture the palaces of your four or five rival civilizations you will rule the world through sheer brute force. Building an army works much like building new structures, and you must factor at least some defense spending into your budget or risk being overrun by the first barbarian that stumbles onto your fledgling community. Technology has the largest impact on your ability to conscript more powerful weapons of war, so regardless of which path to victory you choose, you'll always want to maintain a decent level of tech so that you can defend yourself.

But Civilization Revolution's AI-controlled civs all seem inherently warlike, and although they will always offer you peace on a first meeting, they sour both quickly and easily. In fact, most games played on the tougher difficulty settings seem to force a domination victory as the only feasible means of conquering the world due to the hostility displayed by your opponents. You know what they say, the best defense is a good offense. But in Civ Rev it sometimes seems like the only defense is all-out offense.

Consequently, despite your most humanitarian efforts, you'll likely have to smash at least one rival into the dirt, utterly obliterating all traces of them from the planet as you steamroll over their society, capturing their villages. What is unfortunate is that the AI does not seem to display the variation in opponent behavior that would really exploit the richness provided by the alternate routes to victory. What use is even teasing the potential for an economic victory if you will just be forced into a domination victory by the hyper-antagonistic AI?

Gandhi in San Francisco

In online multiplayer, however, the presence of real people playing as your adversaries allows for a greater range of strategy. While you'll still likely play with a few bot-driven civs to fill out the world, the opportunity to draft treaties that have more staying power than the throw-away doctrines that the AI will toss out at the slightest provocation provides for a bit more leeway in terms of negotiation and foreign policy. Then again, there's no guarantee that a human opponent is in any way more likely to abide by the terms of a treaty than a computer-controlled player, so your mileage may vary.

Although Civ Rev comes with a few game variations that alter the single-player game, there aren't many controls for changing multiplayer games. You don't have access to the various scenarios from the single-player campaign and can only apply handicaps to players and change the timer speed for decision-making. It's a shame that there isn't more granular control over the multiplayer setup, because the Attack of the Huns scenario would likely be a lot of fun to play against real people.

While Civilization Revolution does a great job of introducing the concept and gameplay of Sid Meier's classic PC series to the consoles, it falls just short of true greatness due to a lack of depth in the AI and multiplayer options. It's still lots of fun, but that fun is somewhat stunted in terms of its long-term appeal. So while Civ Rev definitely delivers an addictive gameplay experience in the short run, there are only so many games you can play before the underlying mechanics become completely transparent in much the same way that you eventually realize that The Sims is just an elaborate facade for what is really a game about keeping status bars full. Even so, the console-friendly analog stick-based interface is nothing to scoff at, and as the first and only game of its type to make the transition, Civilization Revolution makes the jump fairly well, if not as gracefully as we might have hoped.