User Reviews Dominate Professional Reviews
The Civ community is huge and dedicated. No professional reviewer can hope to notice the details like these Civ fanatics.
I've read a bunch of professional reviews and, to be honest, they are extremely lacking. There are bunch of user reviews that top any professional reviews that I've read.
Here's the first one I read. Not the best. The very first:
I rarely write reviews for any reason, I'm too lazy. But I find it extremely paramount to write on this one.
I've been playing Civ for about 20 years, it was one of the first video games I was ever exposed to. As an experienced player, I can say that a lot of the changes in here are super interesting and have a lot of potential. The city growth and town mechanics are neat, the new independent settlements rework establishes a refreshing take on the city-state and barbarian dynamics of previous releases, army formations and combat are streamlined in a reasonable way (as opposed to how other things are streamlined), leader diplomacy is a lot more satisfying and sensible, and I really love how all pending tasks and actions are shown as icons in the turn wheel at the bottom and you can select any one of them without defaulting to the primary one the game has selected for you. The game looks visually decent and the sound design and music feels nostalgic and well done. In general a lot of intriguing overhauls and changes make it clear that there is something here.
But this thing is more than rough, more than I remember any other Civ release being.
The UI is terrible. I can't find any of the information that's relevant to my gameplay ever. Notifications are both annoying to click through and simultaneously disappear without any reason. Tactility and telegraphing normally communicated through sounds, camera adjustments, and musical cues are either missing or have regressed into some sort of minimalist alternative. In general, I have to agree with most criticisms on this game, that it feels console-first and hardly geared towards the PC user-base, which I had imagined is the primary user-base. This is not to mention the whole 2K account integration is so annoying and the fact that elements of the game seem to be barred from access until you've done the whole integration process is just a really terrible precedent.
Crucial, BASIC things are COMPLETELY missing. You can't automate explorers. A lot of key command either don't exist anymore or are completely hidden to the player and you just have to try old combinations that you remember from other games. YOU CAN'T QUEUE YOUR TECH TREE AT ALL. There's no quick movement / combat. All advanced options to customize the map, start parameters, and overall game rules are just COMPLETELY gone. Customizations of all kinds are gone. I haven't found a way to rename cities, units, or anything like that.
So many things about this game are a step back. You are actively PUNISHED for doing well, as with each age/era so much of the stuff you've worked hard to develop is removed, exchanged, or nerfed in some way. So much of the tech tree feels useless, as you're basically able to work tiles and gain resources without much strategy involved at all. There are so few penalties or consequences for making decisions, you can essentially just spam every option, production, and purchase whenever you feel like and you'll still be an unstoppable force at least against the AI. The amount and variety of Civs at launch is LAUGHABLE. Narrations are delegated to being very short blurbs with almost no intrigue whatsoever, while simultaneously introducing UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENES to a 4X which makes absolutely ZERO sense. The victory conditions for each age aren't necessarily confusing, but they feel so unnecessary and different from the core advancement principles that Civ has tended to build itself on for years, in a way that feels remarkably counterintuitive.
One of my biggest points of contention I have with this game is the Leader/Civilization dynamic. You are locked into choosing a leader and civilization SEPARATELY. This means you can choose completely non-historic combinations of things. In my current playthrough, I did the first of three ages (the Antiquity age) as Harriet Tubman ... of the Aksum. Once the Antiquity age ends, and you enter the age of Exploration, you have to change what civilization you are AGAIN. The best option for my playstyle so far as I could tell was choosing the MAJAPAHIT? This makes no sense. There is a novelty to it, sure, and I could see some fun gameplay ideas happening as a result of these discrepancies. But being locked into HAVING to do something like this is more than just immersion breaking. It's weird at BEST, and completely messes up everything otherwise. Having to adjust to completely new civ bonuses and contexts with EVERY ADVANCING AGE just feels even more and more punishing for no reason.
There is SOMETHING here. The environments look great, the game feels less cartoonish like Civ VI attempted to be, and there are exciting mechanics and ideas here worth exploring in the long-term. But calling this "unfinished" is generous. Core features are missing and so much backwards regression has been taken. It's not impossible to play, but it's frustrating and barely feels like a Civ game. I am absolutely of the belief that a game HAS to be great without any mods whatsoever, that mods should be delegated to the roles of personal preferences and experimentation. I won't say "wait for mods". I would say wait for this game to be decent, because it's not.
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