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Sid Meier's Civilization: Revolution

aka: CivRev
Moby ID: 35117

Xbox 360 version

One step forward and ten steps back

The Good
The animation is pretty good, the character models all look interesting and I like how their outfits change depending on the age you are in.

The game is more accessible and easy to learn which makes it a nice entry point for people who are new to the Civ games.

The fights look really awesome especially when you engage in dog-fights with aircraft.

The Bad
Every character has the same dialog boxes over and over again and it doesn't help that they speak in gibberish that sounds worse then the voices from Grabbed by the Ghoulies.

The difficulty settings are broken. Sometimes I would play on the easiest option and have a harder time then when I played on a medium difficulty. Playing a game on easy where the enemy players find all the Ancient Artifacts before I create my first boat and build cities all around me like Settlers were part of a Happy Meal is not good game design.

There was really no strategy involved. If I wanted to take over an enemy city I would just bomb the place for a few turns while piling up a few tank armies on the same square of land. I here Civ 5 fixed this, but in this game the only war strategy you need is "have more tanks".

I haven't played a lot of Civ games, but aren't matches in this game supposed to take long? I could play an entire match in this game in less than an hour and the only reason I played it for a long time was to get the achievements, speaking of which.

Some of the achievements are as unreasonable as they can get. The one that got me the most frustration is the one where you need to get all the Great people at least once. This wouldn't be such a problem if I could pick which people I wanted, but this is not the case. Whenever you get enough Culture you get a random person and have to roll with it.

The Bottom Line
I didn't have fun with Civ Revolution, the first three rounds or so were fun, but after that the fun made place for annoyance: annoying gibberish, annoying difficulty and annoying simplicity. To be fair, the graphics are decent and for newcomers this is the perfect introduction to the Civ franchise, but for people who already played one these it is not even worth trying.

by Asinine (957) on May 2, 2011

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