Review - Civilization Revolution (XBOX 360)

I hope to get a comic done tonight. I got a little distracted last night with a game called Civilization Revolution. I’ve never played any Civilization games in the past but I am familiar with other strategy games like Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 2 and Command and Conquer. What interested me in trying Civ Rev is that it is turn based which I like a lot. I can spend as much time as I want researching what to do next. In those other games I listed I would get frustrated when getting attacked while learning the game. Civ Rev takes a lot of the tedious tasks out without having to sacrifice complexity. No longer do I have to click on each individual peon and tell them to mine gold or chop trees. Instead you just build cities and tell them which resource to focus on. Another thing that sets it apart is that there are multiple ways to win the game. You can dominate your opponents of course by military force, or you can win by building enough technology, culture, economy or diplomacy.

My first game I played as Abraham Lincoln in charge of America. Depending on what your goal is you research different things to get there. There is a very handy diagram that shows every skill and what you need to research to get it. Since this was my first time I was researching all kinds of things and wasn’t focused at all. I ended up going for a military victory and built a lot of soldiers. Moving soldiers is so easy even without a mouse. You can group 3 of the same unit into an army. You can also click on a square far away, it will show you how many turns it will take to get there, and you can set your army to move over multiple turns automatically. Building units like soldiers is really cool. The city will show how many turns until the unit is complete. In the middle of building a unit or building you can change to another unit, all the process you made will be applied to the new unit. My only minor complaint is that you can’t move armies through an ally’s territory, so you have to make sure you build a city near any narrow land bridges before they do. Otherwise you have to use boats to move your armies around and that takes forever.

Overall I highly recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of strategy or city building games. It’s easy enough that any casual gamer can pick up and play and yet it offers enough complexity for hardcore players to enjoy. I give this game a 5.67 out of 6 and 3/8ths.