Civilization 7 review – A crowning achievement with a tarnished gem

Where to start with a strategy game as mammoth as Civilization 7? There are so many things we could talk about, from new systems and big changes to those gorgeous graphics. I’m having to fight against the urge to dive down into the minutiae right away.

It’s still Civ. I think that’s the most important thing I can communicate to the reader. In the early days of Civilization 7’s marketing there were some fears that the game had gone too far, that it would be too big a break from what had come before. But I was honestly quite surprised by how intuitive and easy Civ 7 was to jump into for me, someone who has played an awful lot of Civilization 5 but only really dabbled in the sixth instalment of the series.

Right from my first five turns selecting basic buildings and research, to my 200th – eyes straining, playing in bed at 2 am with no desire to let the cold grip of sleep tear me away from the war waging onscreen – the experience felt familiar but fresh, like getting the next model of your favorite phone brand. Most of the basics are as you remember them, but there are all sorts of intriguing new possibilities as well.

Adding to that box-fresh feel are Civilization 7’s incredible graphics. I don’t feel the need to spend too long waxing poetic about them; you can look at the pictures and videos for yourself. I will simply say that they are lovely – even on the medium settings my potato PC can manage – and that it’s a very enjoyable game world to spend time in.

I think that, whereas Civilization 6’s cartoonish art style was very divisive, the middle ground struck by this game is going to win over almost everyone. There are lots of lovely details to soak up, too, like the fact that the same units can have totally different models, depending on which culture they come from.

History is like onions

Now let’s leap right into the big one: the Ages system. Rather than overseeing a single civilization’s progression from stone tools to space ships, this sees you switching civs twice per campaign, as you move from Antiquity to Exploration, and Exploration to the Modern Age.

It’s the big question hanging over Civilization 7, one that, when it was announced, had just as many detractors as fans. In particular, many were worried that it sounded a lot like another 4X game Humankind, which had a decidedly mixed reception. If the Ages system was a flop, it would spell doom for this title.

When I first heard about this idea, I was as sceptical about it as anyone, worried that in jumping from the Romans to the Normans to Mexico, Civilization would lose its sense of throughline, no longer have that satisfying feeling of leading an empire through time that is essential to the series’ appeal. But now that I’ve actually experienced it first person, I can unabashedly call it a triumph. Firaxis had a clear vision for its Ages system and it’s succeeded at almost everything it set out to accomplish.

The main benefit is, of course, that it makes every Civilization relevant to the stage of the game you’re playing. You no longer have to worry about ‘late game’ civs, which only get their unique buildings or units once most of the important parts of the game have passed, and the victor is all but decided. Now everyone always has something interesting and unique to build. Accessing brand new abilities is exciting as well. In previous instalments I always felt like I was waiting for the cool part of my civilization to kick in. Now you get to live that high three times.

Splitting Civilization 7 into three distinct Ages also allows Firaxis to add some nice variety to the map, which can spice up your campaign and prevent it from going stale midway through. For instance, Independent Powers (which fulfil the role of both barbarians and city-states depending on their relationship with you) are tied to Ages, with new ones appearing in each third of the game. Certain resources and mechanics will also show up as you progress, and the game world itself expands with each new Age, giving you brand new land to explore.

Progressing through time

The Ages system is inherently tied to the Legacy Paths mechanic, another new feature that I think works really well. In each Age, there are particular objectives you can complete, one for each path to victory: cultural, scientific, military, and economic. So, for instance, in Antiquity you complete economic milestones by connecting new resources to your empire, while in Exploration you complete them by importing goods from faraway lands with treasure fleets.

Completing these milestones not only unlocks rewards that you can upgrade your leader and civilization with in later Ages, it also hastens the end of an Age. The Age will end, not when a particular turn limit is reached, but when enough players have reached sufficient milestones.

I think it’s a genuinely excellent addition. While it’s a bit gamey, it gives you something to strive for, with clear goals to achieve at each stage, and nice little dopamine-activating meters filling up. It provides valuable bonuses later in the game but doesn’t lock you into one particular strategy early on.

While completing a Legacy Path and unlocking a golden age bonus (or a victory condition once you complete a Modern Age Legacy Path) will require some work, none of the objectives ask you to go out of your way – you will always complete several milestones just through the decisions you would already be making.

The final point in favor of the Ages system is it provides a soft reset, which I think will make multiplayer in particular that much more palatable. If your game plan’s been going poorly, you can pivot, picking a civilization more geared towards a different strategy (if you’re super duper smart, you can even make sure you have a particular nation available, by taking specific actions in-game to unlock them.)

Apart from your capital, all your cities will revert to towns, which lets you decide anew which settlements to develop. It’s a valuable chance to step back and take stock.

But crucially, it also prevents a stronger player from snowballing out of control. Between ages, wars will end, making it harder to knock out a weak player. And while a skilled player can earn lots of bonuses that give them a significant edge in later ages, you’ll have fewer non-games that are decided in the first 100 turns. The science leader will never have rocket launchers while you’re yet to discover gunpowder, for instance.

I should also point out that ages are not short. In the campaign I began over the weekend, Antiquity Age is looking likely to stretch to about 120-140 turns, and that’s with speed set to Quick. So you still have that feeling of gradual progression as you unlock new techs, build new buildings, clear out barb camps (sorry, “independent nations”), and construct wonders.

And your leader, equipped with their own unique bonus, is a constant presence, giving a face to your campaign. Mixing leaders and civilizations honestly seems stranger to me than changing civ with each age, but it should at least allow for a great deal of experimentation and variety.

It does make you feel a bit detached from the country you are playing though. As each leader suddenly finds themselves at the helm of a brand new people in each age, at times Civ 7 feels like children playing with toys. But it never made sense to have an immortal god-being in charge of your country for thousands of years, either, so while I wasn’t keen at first, it didn’t take very long for me to get used to it.

And it was better being able to get to know the characters in my campaign than it would be to have them shift with each Age – adding to the sense of a consistent throughline and developing story. “Ah, Friedrich, my old friend. As the Romans and Maya our nations were bosom buds, but now your Spanish cities are infringing on my Norman motte & baileys. Prepare to die!”

A part of me does sort of wish it was only the player able to pick unusual nations. I’d rather the AI were restricted to selecting the most thematic choice for their leader – if only so I don’t have to constantly remind myself that Alexander the Great is not Greece.

But as you can hopefully see, the downsides to Civilization 7’s biggest gameplay shifts are mainly thematic and narrative in nature, whereas the upsides are all about gameplay. On balance, for a turn based strategy game, I’d rather it were that way around.

The only big gameplay issue I found is that Ages have the potential to smooth out games of Civ, and make them less dramatic. Not being able to easily knock out a weaker player keeps everyone in the game, but it also hampers an aspect of play that domination players enjoyed. Similarly, Civ 7 doesn’t let you convert an opponent’s holy city – presumably to prevent a feel bad moment? Bah!

And while keeping tech trees gated by Ages will stop a player snowballing into the lead, it also prevents more radical strategies like beelining up the tech tree for a specific unlock.

There’s a few times throughout playing Civ 7 that I felt things may be overly streamlined and smoothed. For instance, it’s possible I just don’t appreciate their implications fully, but most of the abilities on leaders and nations felt quite small-scale, with nothing splashy that wowed me.

Wonders and Woes

Just as a Civilization session has a nasty habit of stretching into the wee hours, this review is growing ever-longer, so I will only touch on a few more mechanics, both good and bad, before getting to my biggest complaint.

First off, not everything sings. Some mechanics feel underbaked, or like they’ve only been thrown in because they were in prior instalments. For instance, natural disasters feel random and unfun, since Civ 7 gives no way to defend yourself from them, and religion is so barebones as to feel almost like an afterthought. There’s no faith yield, no religious victory condition, and I have suspicions that Firaxis may be saving a whole chunk of the game here to introduce as DLC.

Firmly in the pros column is the way cities are developed. It’s a brilliant expansion of the ideas Civ 6 brought in, letting you tinker away with building placements and adjacencies without feeling too restricted in your choices, or like you need to have everything planned out from turn one.

As your cities and towns grow in population, you can choose where to place rural districts, which serve as the improvements like farms and mines that workers would, in past games, construct. Place these near the edge of your borders and they’ll expand – allowing you to reach out and snatch valuable resources early.

Meanwhile, buildings create urban districts, with bonus yields based on what you can pop them next to. It’s quite forgiving – letting you place a new rural district whenever you build over one. Overall, it feels lovely and organic, and tinkering away at a growing city is a lot of fun. In the first two Ages of the game, anyway…

Diplomacy was a definite annoyance – at least during my first campaign. I don’t have strong feelings about the new influence yield type, which lets you play with independent powers and engage other players in unilateral deals, but it seems too difficult to affect how the AI feels about you.

Like in Civ 6, each leader has their own agenda, demanding that you not engage with specific portions of the game or face their eternal wrath. Don’t build any settlements on deserts (you’ll have near 20 by the end of the game), don’t have Great Works, don’t settle on a Natural Wonder. Why can’t these irritating neighbors just mind their own business?

Their view of me poisoned by these pernicious requests, the entire world of my first campaign declared war on me early in the Modern age. Then they – frustratingly – hated me for the rest of the age because we’d had a war, leading to everyone coming back in for round two 50 turns later.

What’s worse, war always seems to end with settlement trading, and for reasons I cannot fathom, there is no way to exit a peace deal and see what you’re actually bartering for. You didn’t memorize the names and positions of 60 different settlements before you started this war? Well, I guess you’ll be rolling the dice.

An Achilles’ Heel

Ultimately, it’s frustrations like this – quality of life and UI issues, which unfortunately drag this game down from a 9 or even a perfect 10 to a 7 or 8 for me. There’s just lots of little things like not being able to rename your cities, some which don’t even seem like they’d be that hard to fix.

Civilization has often been a little bit needlessly vague, a little bit obscure about presenting detailed information. I really thought that might’ve changed by now, but it has not.

Here’s a small but telling example. When you go to the screen with the global yields breakdown, you can’t reorder the rows to see which cities are providing the most food, production, science, etc., and the game even hides what each column refers to when you scroll down.

Furthermore, an inherently important part of later ages is constructing buildings over the top of older districts, and the game is infuriatingly vague about what each building provides and where various bonuses are coming from.

In my first turn of the Modern Age, I decided to buy a building and construct it over an observatory. The game told me I’d get +3 production, +4 science, and +4 culture. But, I wasn’t sure if it had factored in the science I’d assuredly lose from scrapping all those telescopes. So to figure out what the observatory was making, I had to click out from what I was doing, perform six separate mouse clicks (or three and a big scroll) to go and find out that the observatory was giving me three science.

Still unsure if I was gaining one science here or four, I bought the building. My science went up by 1.7, my production by 6.4, and my culture by 7. Baffling.

The feeling of constructing a sweeping empire is conveyed excellently, but all too often when I tried to examine the minutiae, it was needlessly difficult, or the numbers didn’t quite line up with what the game was telling me. Other strategy games have cracked this by now, and Civilization, one of the biggest names in the business, has no reason not to be following suit. Look at a Paradox grand strategy game some time, damn it!

But I’m well aware this gripe may be specific to me, and I don’t want it to hugely hamper my take on what is otherwise a great game. Overall, Civilization 7 is a fantastic experience – with lots of well thought out changes that for the most part make it an upgrade layered on top of what has come before. But (and I realize I sound like the biggest nerd in the world here) my goodness would I love to see some nice little nested tooltips!

Source: Wargamer