Civilization: Call to Power

The Good
The game has some nice Wonder movies.

The Bad
Other than the movies, everything:
* Interface: Clumsy. It takes quite a while to get used to it, and every minor task requires a lot of other minor tasks.
* Graphics: Ugly. The units are small and unrecognizable and the buildings are poorly rendered.
* Stability: None. The game constantly crashes.
* Gamplay: Terrible. The AI barely moves, and the first turn of the game takes 15-20 seconds, not even mentioning the later ones. There are many one-purpose units which require a special defense, there are many units (like the Slaver) which drain your resources and require a special defense just for them. One of the wonders actually has a chance of 3% a turn to make you lose the game.

All in all, this game is a terrible miss, trying to ride the fame of a popular game to sell more copies.

The Bottom Line
This game is full of flaws with almost no advantages. There are other, much better strategy games available, so you better try one of them.

The Good
Beautiful cinematic cut scenes, interesting music (very similar to the music in Gladiator!)

The Bad
Extremely slow and clumsy gameplay. Way, way, too many unit types, wonders, and improvements. The game tries to be everything to everyone, it fails at this. Unstable platform, crashed on me several times.

The Bottom Line
On occasion, I can play through 6000 years of Civilization II in one evening. Civ CTP is so slow, and there are so many choices, playing this game is more like a chore than an evening of leisure.

The Good
Activision paid big bucks for the Civ license, so of course they'd want to do a good job on the product. Sid Meier purists will call me a traitor, but there are good points about this game to be commended on. For example, the concept of stacked armies for combat makes sense. No battle in the real world was fought without coordinated military units, so why shouldn't that be the case in the Civ world? The graphics are the most beautiful in any Civ game to date, and various parts of the game are really beautiful to look at.

The Bad
Unfortunately, despite all the innovative features, the folks at Activision crashed Call to Power to the ground by bloating it with unnecessary frivilous accessories and skimping out on the real essentials. The interface is by far the greatest downfall. Activision tried to radically alter the interface in the hope that the player would be able to do things more efficiently. The interface is streamlined and almost all interactions take place in the bottom area of the screen. Such familiar items as the City Window are gone. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything wrong with the original interface, and the adage of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" comes instantly to mind. You'll notice when playing Call to Power that you get to see the map a lot. Now where do you get that usually? Yes, in real-time strategy games. Activision slapped on an RTS interface on a Civ game, and that's why most people will not like it (myself included). The graphics, although very nice, also really put strain on the system. Animations are somewhat slow, and one gets anxious getting on to the next unit while waiting for the first to lumber along. There is no "railroad speeding" in this game (as in how units seem to zoom along railroads in Civ II or the maglevs in Alpha Centauri). The unconventional warfare units are also very annoying. Perhaps there'll be a day when I'll master unconventional warfare, but the effects of ecoterrorists and lawyers are just too large to make the game enjoyable. The tech tree also leads to extremely advanced units, which take a horrifically long time to build even the simplest defender on a conquered city, whose population will obviously be reduced to low levels to make it even more difficult to defend. The battles favour defense to an amazing level, where fresh stealth bombers can be brought down by machine gunners without any SAM assistance. This makes offensive drives extremely tedious and depressing.

The Bottom Line
The folks at Activision obviously tried very hard to put a new spin on the Civ franchise, as the massive battle and interface changes show. However, they had failed to see what made the original Civ formula so successful, and in this they have created what many see as a very disappointing product. However, the license does show promise, and one hopes at least some of the problems will be remedied in the upcoming sequel, which, by the way, does not carry the Civ title.