Civilization Revolution (Xbox 360)

All the flavor with half the calories -- finally, a Civ game worth playing on the consoles.
8/20/2008 12:00 AM | 1 Comments | Page 2 of 3

The peace treaty you just made with the Germans looks to placate them long enough to you continue your push to the south of the continent, right through Napoleon's flimsy defenses. At this point you realize, goddammit, you're just playing Civilization.

The endless list of new features in Civilization Revolution that take away a favorite a play tactic or a tried-and-true strategy don't matter as much as the raw appeal of steadily building up your civilization and trying to outrun everyone else in the world to the finish line. Revolution, whatever else the box says, is just Civ.

Sure, you'll miss the world map. It makes exploring more difficult, since you can't easily see the large swaths of fog that are surely hiding all kinds of goodies. (You get used to scrolling around the world with the thumbstick to look for things.) Online play works, but the turn-based formula grinds a little slowly for the console twitch culture. And certainly, the most hardcore fans will lament the lack of editors -- long a staple of nerds who happily learned Python so they could write their own game scripts.

As experienced Civ players might have worried, simplifying combat and resource management make the game easier to play while also taking away those clever strategies you've used over the years. Before, if you met a world leader who liked to fortify their cities and wait out the battle, you could use your units to tear up his roads and farms and slowly starve him into compliance. Now, it's fight or nothing. You can still tweak your city production toward a specific goal, but in most of the game's levels of difficulty, you won't have a reason to play city manager.

A consequence of this user-friendly, streamlined style of play is that Revolution seems to favor military conquest over the more high-minded economic, technological or cultural victories. Civ's always argued a "peace through superior firepower" idea -- forcing even the most pacifistic premiers to build up a heavy defensive force -- and Rev takes it a step further. In too many ways, it's easier to blow your neighbors up than to negotiate with them.

Remarkably, though, you never really feel like you are playing Civ Jr. The Civilization games always have offered you plenty of choices, but never made you think about too much about too many things. If you wanted to focus on that naval strategy, or really work on your economy, you could do that without a lot of fuss. Things could certainly go wrong, and you'd have to buy off the French or battle the Japanese -- but most of the time, you could just focus on deciding whether you wanted a new city to crank out more soldiers or settlers on the way to your next objective. The fact that you had 80,000 possible options never really mattered, as long as you had two good choices in front of you.

Meier has been famously quoted as claiming that "A game is series of interesting choices." With Revolution he seems to have figured out what fancy restaurants have known forever -- people really only want to choose from chicken, steak, pork, fish or vegetarian. They don't need Denny's encyclopedic menu of eggs prepared four dozen different ways to enjoy a meal. The cultured palette only wants to make a few strong choices and let the chef made them worthwhile.