The king isn’t dead, but now’s a good time to come at him.
Civilization 7 is by no means a bad game.
I open with that to acknowledge its competence, and to damn it.
Civ is the archetypal 4X, and in some senses, Civ 7 remains a standard-bearer.
Civilization 7 review
But it’sdull.
Even some of its most flawed challengers are far more interesting.
At times, when I hit a stretch of “just one more turn!”
it felt less like an in-joke than a curse.
Your choice of leader is now untethered from their historical place.
Each age partly resets foreign relations, trade, reserves, and building effects.
In practice, they’re either irrelevant or deeply irritating.
Picture a Civ where you’re suddenly told everyone’s unhappy for no reason.
In Civ 7, you make Number Go Up until you get 20 percent more of another number.
Angry Civ-izens would rampage across that same town, and might declare independence.
My recourse was to pay for repairs.
They burned them down again on the next turn.
And the next, and the next.
What did the librarydoto you people?
Eventually an unhappy town “rebels” by seamlessly joining another, potentially allied empire.
you might’t contest it without warring on that empire.
you might’t grant independence or trade it away.
“My metropolis in exchange for survival?
My two villages in exchange for survival and your entire empire?
You could raise happiness through trade.
Goods acquired via expansion or merchants can slot into settlements to bump production, food, etc.
It allows, for example, a single-hex island city that can still build.
Civ 7 has ideas to add a narrative spin, but the dully numerical execution has the opposite effect.
Narrative events are eye-glazing pop-ups amounting to “get 50 culture or 80 food”.
One crisis was a religious conflict over…
I don’t even know.
I founded Buddhism, someone else Orthodoxy.
None have any relationship or meaning (there’s something very uncomfortable about Pachacuti converting people to Catholicism).
The only difference is what bonus you picked for converting cities, which nobody seems to mind.
There’s a terrible conflict, I’m told.
The reality: sometimes a foreign missionary visits a city, so my people burn down three buildings.
I repair them one by one, for 20-100 of my 41,552 gold.
Age progress is driven by what are essentially achievements, divided across four “legacy paths”.
It meant so little I’m still not sure if anyone else researched an ideology.
Nobody even told me when several wars started, although to be fair I ignored them without consequence.
The narrative falls flat, conveying no meaning, binding with nothing, but insisting on chores.
There’s nothing to them.
“We were allied in the last age, have great relations and loads of trade?
I reject your alliance offer!
-30 to relations!”.
All right, whatever, I forgot you existed anyway.
If you park an explorer, you’re never finding him again.
Civilization 7’s interface is ashamed that it’s a strategy game.
Red-, green-, and blue-blind colour options.
Subtitles, OS-voice narration when hovering and/or receiving multiplayer chat.
There’s no button to interrupt it, rendering quick browsing impossible.
Note that even without narration, tooltips vary in clarity.
Next time, just use that tone when my capital is besiegedbeforeit’s conquered).
Don’t start me either on how it wants you to unlock shit.
Civilization 7 is pretty and detailed and sounds fine (I caught that one tune from Colonization!).
Its design broadly works, and a certain kind of city-optimising fan may even love it.
A copy of Civilization 7 was provided for review by publisher 2K.
