Civilization 7 review

A competent entry with some poorly executed ideas and a striking lack of personality.

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. It's better, in a general sort of way, than most recent attempts to unseat or deconstruct it. There's lots going on, production values are high, and it innovates with a new structure and revamped diplomacy, city expansion, and more.

But it's dull. 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.

The most immediate changes are to the formula of "take a historical culture from an ancient village to modern world domination" itself. Your choice of leader is now untethered from their historical place. A full game is divided into three ages that require you to choose a new culture (with bonuses less numerical and more specific than in Humankind). Each age partly resets foreign relations, trade, reserves, and building effects. They downgrade cities into towns, themselves a new feature: newly founded settlements can only buy (not build) a limited set of buildings, but grow faster, and can halt that growth to become specialised tributaries instead of cities.

Civilization 7 Review

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The intent is, I think, to break away from slogging through 6,000 years of one path, of warring forever against that one rival, and to allow adaptation and experimentation. The first two ages close with escalating crises that force you to choose negative modifiers (evil doppelgangers of social policies, which are unlocked with culture instead of science) until the act break. It's a move towards narrative - an unpredictable challenge to make the game - and you - less rote. In practice, they're either irrelevant or deeply irritating.

Picture a Civ where you're suddenly told everyone's unhappy for no reason. You can influence where the damage falls somewhat, but unless you knew in advance, chances are you didn't focus on getting everyone's happiness above 12-18, considering there's little benefit to being above 1. Excess pools into an empire-wide "celebration": several turns of whichever dull bonus your otherwise irrelevant government type provides.

As a child, I played an old copy of Civilization on a yellowed second hand machine while recovering from surgery. When a city was happy, a gentle tune played as people paraded past their town, proclaiming "we love the emperor". 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. In 7, they burn down the library and the exact fucking buildings you need to produce things that would make them happier.

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 library do to you people?

Eventually an unhappy town "rebels" by seamlessly joining another, potentially allied empire. You can't contest it without warring on that empire. You can't grant independence or trade it away. You never exchange anything, in fact, unless you're at war, in which case the AI will concede exactly one settlement. "My metropolis in exchange for survival? Sure! My two villages in exchange for survival and your entire empire? NEVER!"

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. But you can only redistribute resources after acquiring a new one, just as you can only change social policies after researching a new one. Most goods become useless in the third age until you build a heap of infrastructure, making my trade specialty almost as laborious as its interface.

It's arbitrary. 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.

It's the same for natural disasters, which add a chance that some farms will remain damaged for hours because you didn't manually check every settlement. You can't name continents, rivers, or even your own cities, deepening the sense of disconnect, a lack of character you can't fill in.

Age progress is driven by what are essentially achievements, divided across four "legacy paths". Age 2's economic path was the least tedious: a colonialism-themed race to siphon resources from "distant lands". But its culture path equates culture with religion, which means "acquiring relics", mostly through unexciting research. Age 3 is about ideology - democracy, fascism, or communism (capitalism is a civic - like colonialism, which comes with a quote about how bad it is, so that's all right then). I thought, this might be the first time I'd needed to think about what other empires might do. It was not. 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.

Though I recognise the concept - eras defined by more than technology - they're imbalanced, and worse: dull. Dull, too, is diplomacy, built on generating "influence" and spending it to initiate or counteract overtures. Nobody shows any personality, nobody has anything to say and nowhere is anyone's motivation explained, beyond the "agendas", which alter relations based on some arbitrary metric. One leader dislikes you if you have too many mountains, which would be funny if he ever mentioned it, and it wasn't depicted as a bland "-30 leader agenda". I think of Six Ages: Ride like the Wind, where you get guys who obsess about goats, or roast people in song.

Relationship modifiers don't specify who they refer to, and you don't even determine your own opinion - if a leader settles on someone's border, you automatically like them less. 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.

Civ 7 has another key conflict: it wants to be sleek and approachable, but teems with hidden rules and details. Information is absent or buried away in submenus, while microscopic icons - another issue - deliver poorly organised, irrelevant news every turn. Some text is needlessly confusing, and the encyclopedia offers paragraphs on the historical context of grassland, but not what you can do with it. Statistics screens are almost non-existent, laborious layouts make poor use of space, its "breakdowns" are unsortable and near useless, and there's no unit list. If you park an explorer, you're never finding him again.

Civilization 7's interface is ashamed that it's a strategy game. But all its obscuration makes it less accessible and convenient, and contradicts the city-growing element, which poses endless questions about what to build where, which tiles to expand into, and why in the christ can't I demolish buildings? There are many "adjacency" bonuses I thought I was using, yet I sailed through to age 3 with double everyone's numbers only to implement a "+1 for every adjacency" policy that amounted to +9, while alternatives produced triple figures.

As for war, I hesitate to mention that I once went through two ages without a single battle (or alliance), because the other was a tedious whack-a-mole with limited, poorly organised information (thanks for the red alert when a soldier saw my town! Next time, please use that tone when my capital is besieged before it's conquered). Don't start me either on how it wants you to unlock shit. Half the cultures were greyed out because I hadn't jumped through hoops, and the "new game" screen hints you must grind for "memento" bonuses. I don't know if I unlocked none because I play offline, because it's pre-release, or I plain didn't qualify, and I don't care.

Civilization 7 is pretty and detailed and sounds fine (I caught that one tune from Colonization!). AI turns are perhaps the fastest I've ever seen, and its UI has enough potential to make some of my complaints feel patchable. Its design broadly works, and a certain kind of city-optimising fan may even love it. But its lack of character is endemic, the extent of its annoying habits and oversights shocking for a series of such pedigree. It's a dull, contradictory game, and instead of showing everyone how it's done, it's felt since hour one like a game that leaves the 4X throne empty.

A copy of Civilization 7 was provided for review by publisher 2K.