The general consensus with the gaming community is that strategy games on consoles don’t really work. You don’t have all the hotkeys or the easy point-and-click that you get with PC strategy games, so when any console strategy game is made, it’s either got a horrible control scheme or it’s overly simplified. Because of these reasons, I was a little sceptical when I checked out the trailer and demo for Civilization Revolution. But it quickly won me over, and made me determined to check out the full version of the game.

 For those who don’t know Sid Meier’s ‘Civilization’ series, they’re strategy games, which allow you to take control of a race and build them up from simple nomads into a vast empire. You control just about everything in great detail, from which government you decide to rule with to which unfortunate chap is going to die for your own virtual glory, as you tried to lead your people to world domination. It’s a fantastic, and as a result incredibly successful, premise that allows you to vary your tactics and gameplay to suit how you want your civilisation to grow, and it’s no surprise that the series has now come to console.

I bet a certain sexually repressed game developer had fun designing her.

Civilization Revolution (Civ Rev) holds true to the premise of the older games, as a short cutscene at the beginning of game reminds us. After choosing from a variety of polarising civilisations (I usually choose the English out of blind patriotism), you’ll settle in a city and start expanding, meeting other civilisations, researching technologies, training armies and trying to build towards one of the four victories: which I will go through in detail as if I have some kind of reviewing OCD.

Domination
The aim of a domination victory is to capture every capital city in the world, as a display of your military might. If you’re the type of person who loves sending wave after wave of armies into battle, this is probably the victory you’ll be aiming for. Building vast armies and letting them wreak havoc across huge continents is a lot of fun. It’s a difficult victory to attain, and annoying it’s the one that every other civilisation is going to try and rope you into by declaring war over incredibly trivial things, but looking back over the cities you’ve conquered and the budding emperors you’ve put out of jobs is immensely satisfying.

What kind of asshole declares war on Ghandi!?

Technological
If you think that building a spaceship you can’t control, waiting ages for it to become ready, then sending it off to a planet you’ll never be able to see is worth your gameplay time, then you’ll love the technology victory. As you can probably tell, I don’t. While technology is obviously very important to the growth of your civilisation, I found much more interesting uses for it than a couple of spaceship animations.

Economical
This one is for the gold diggers out there. As you hoard money in your coffers like the greedy sod you are, you’ll be gradually gifted with many different bonuses. Once you hit 20,000 gold, you’ll be given the opportunity to build the glorious “World Bank” wonder, which is an instant victory It’s a very simple victory to achieve, but it’s not particularly satisfying.

Cultural
Now this is by far my favourite kind of victory in Civ Rev, because it’s the one that really encourages your civilisation to be great. Building wonders, luring great people, and converting other cities to your empire with your excessive culture is the aim of a cultural victory, and you’ll need a lot of patience to pull this off, but it’s worth it. I really got a kick out of watching my small but incredibly cultured cities topple entire continents, without me having to lift a finger or send out a single army. It’s like standing on a man twice your size and making him eat dirt, as you poke him in the ribs with a golden pimp cane. It’s a wonderful feeling.

A side effect of culture is that you become a stuck-up arse. Incidentally, guess what he’s going to do with that sti - forget it.

At a glance, the different types of victories in Civ Rev seem fairly diverse, but having played through the campaign mode about five times (yes, I know I should get out more, shut up), I noticed that I tend to play each game the same, but end up with different victories. Pretty much every game I play is about whittling down an opponents resources and cities with massive culture, while they mindless throw pitifully weak armies at my well defended border-cities, before I strike the killer blow with a massive and incredibly advanced army. It kind of defies the point of having four different victories, when they can all be won in the exact same way, with only a slight adjustment in strategy required when you’re close to the end of the game, which takes away a lot of the replay value that Civ Rev might have had. Still, with that said, the single player is, for a while, fun and simple, which makes it incredibly accessible for newcomers to the Civilization series. Just don’t expect the novelty to last too long.

Aside from the fun and simplicity of the gameplay, Civ Rev is also made accessible with cartoony and bright graphics. From the roaming hills and mountain ranges to the whales swimming in the sea, the world you’ll conquer is absolutely gorgeous and beautifully animated, which compensates for fairly small size of the worlds. Not only does the beautiful world make Civ Rev a more enjoyable game, but the huge amount of diversity in the way different terrain and resources look makes strategic placement of cities or armies brilliantly simple. The advisors and great world leaders are all superbly animated, colourful, and cartoony characters, and this makes them a lot of fun to play against, especially in comparison to the old, cardboard-cut-out style of characters that I was used to in the old civilisation games.

On second thoughts, settling my people in-between three other civilisations was a bad idea…

Still, even though Civ Rev does have all this going for it, there’s still the issue of the game lacking much replay value. There are some scenarios that you can play as well as the single player campaign, but these don’t really add anything to the game. It’s essentially the campaign mode, but with a few slight changes, and it’s just not worth playing through if you have beaten the campaign.
Normally, once I finish a games single player I’ll fire up the multiplayer, and test myself against other players in different scenarios. While Civ Rev does have a multiplayer option on Xbox Live or system link (but not on the same console, which is annoying), it’s not really different from the single player. You play as the same civilisations, you can use the same tactics, and you fight the same people. The only difference is that people aren’t declaring war on you every five seconds. I think that it’s a very well implemented system, and the timer feature works very well, but I feel that the multiplayer just doesn’t really add anything, at least not to the extent that most multiplayer modes do.

4th Dimensional rocketships going up… but only on the PS3.

So as a stand alone game Civ Rev is pretty good, but as the first console game in the series how does it compare to the PC versions of Civilization? Since the average console gamer isn’t quite as sophisticated as a PC gamer, I expected Civ Rev to be a little bit simpler than the previous PC games, but hopefully not so simple that it took away the strategy and customisation that made the series great.

Unfortunately, Civ Rev is a little too simple for seasoned Civilization players to really enjoy, and I think this is probably a result of the game being built from the ground up. While this has benefited the game in some ways (brilliant control scheme), it‘s resulted in the game leaving out a lot of old features. Loads of technologies and units that I remembered from the old versions no longer exist, and some of the units can never be upgraded. Different races no longer have distinctly unique units, instead having slight variations of units everyone else has. With the lack of technologies to research, this makes the average single player game incredibly short. The big annoyance for me was that in Civ Rev, you can’t take your civilisation any further than the Modern age, so you can’t enjoy brushing aside empires with armies that would be better suited to a galaxy far, far away (I am such a nerd). It seems like a really basic thing to leave in, since every Civilization player I know enjoys the futuristic warfare, and without it Civ Rev feels increasingly incomplete.

Civilization Revolution is still a good, solid game, and newcomers to the series will find this game accessible and fun, with it‘s great looks and smooth controls. But if you’re a Civilization veteran, you’re going to be disappointed with the lack of detail, and the simplicity of the game. I don’t think the game does anything wrong, it just doesn’t quite do enough. Still, it’s a very good console debut for the series, and I hope that they continue expanding on console, since Revolution has really raised the bar for console strategies.

Screenshots stolen from IGN, again.

And congratulations to anyone who understood the 5th caption!