There's one historical movie scene that comes to mind for me when I think about Sid Meier's Civilization 7, and it's not a flashy arena fight in Gladiator or mission control cheering as we safely bring Apollo 13 back home. It's Leo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator, running his hand along an airplane fuselage and insisting that he doesn't want to see any rivets. There's some method to the madness of smoothing out the texture in its design, and at times I can see why Firaxis went in this direction. But while its takes some good swings with combat and diplomacy and it is still overall a good time to build a civilization from the ground up, I find that this obsessive streamlining is more often than not to the long-awaited 4X successor's detriment.
Let me just restate for emphasis right from the jump that I don't hate playing Civ 7. It retains a lot of the series' signature charm and polish. There's an almost indefinable quality of craftsmanship to it that none in the barrage of recent Civ competitors has been able to replicate. It's more that it’s like this iteration was designed by Apple, trying to be "user-friendly" by taking away the ability to dig into the guts of its systems or fine-tune your experience. And I’m an Android person.
The biggest culprit here is the interface, which simply doesn't provide enough of the information I would hope to find in a strategy game of this complexity. Learning to play Civ 7 is downright frustrating, and while I eventually figured out how to live with its woefully inadequate tooltips and barren Civilopedia entries, I never liked it. I constantly found myself hovering over things and left-clicking, right-clicking, holding down Shift, Alt, Ctrl, screw it, ScrollLock – anything in the hope that I could bring up more information. But it’s just not there.
In one of my first campaigns, I saw a little guy called a Kahuna wandering around my territory. Now, I could open up the Civilopedia and type in “Kahuna” and find out that he's a unique missionary available to the Hawaiian civ. But bar that, I don't have any information available here on the map about what he is. Is he a military unit? Is he dangerous? What is he doing here? Can I eat him? Likewise, clicking on a city center will bring up a basic info view, and you can click a button to show more information. But not a lot more information. Rarely enough.
It’s cool that every building is represented on the map, but hovering over them doesn’t remind me what they do. Again, I have to go into the Civilopedia and type out the name. There's not even a shortcut to click on a unit or building to bring up the Civilopedia entry that I could find. I can't even see where my specialists are placed unless I'm prompted to place a new specialist. That’s kind of bewildering.
I know Civ 7 is the first one to launch simultaneously on consoles, but information-dense games like Stellaris and Caves of Qud have done absolutely admirably at making all of their vital details available at the touch of a controller. The absolute worst solution to the problem is just to go, "Eh, you don't really need detailed tooltips, do you?" That's exactly what Civ 7 has done, and while not catastrophic, it gets on my nerves constantly.
This minimalist philosophy even extends to the set-up screen, which has a paltry number of options compared to any previous Civ game in the past couple of decades. There are three world sizes and six different map types, but if you want to know what the difference between “Continents” and “Continents Plus” is, again, you're out of luck, buddy. Go Google it maybe. There's no explanation of the different difficulty levels, either. And while "Standard" does feel fairly large, even on "Archipelago" it generated maps where more than half of the world is land, so I was really missing Civ 6 options like world age, rainfall, sea level, or any of the neat tweaks I've come to expect.
And even if there were more map types, I don’t know if it’d make a difference with the way things are balanced right now. A farm on flat desert is just as productive as one on flat grassland, so trying to switch things up by making a desert world would be a mostly visual change. It really feels like Firaxis wanted to give us a very specific, narrow experience with almost no room for customization.
But as I said, that narrow experience is not by any means a terrible one. There is something to be said for a lean, mean, streamlined Civilization game a la Civ Revolution. And once I settled into its awkward, one-size-fits-all throne, I was having a pretty good time for most of it.
The music and sound design deserve a prominent mention. Christopher Tin only puts out bangers, and "Live Gloriously," which features lyrics in Ancient Greek taken straight from The Iliad, is no exception. I also enjoyed Gwendoline Christie's narration, and the sound effects for everything from plopping a new district to opening fire with a rifle company are punchy and satisfying.
Also, in a first for this series, well-written narrative events pop up to bring a touch of human character to the broad sweep of history, and I particularly liked that there are some impactful ones for specific Civs. Playing as the Shawnee, upon unlocking factories, I got the option to keep true to our people's old ways, which reduced the production output of my industries but gave me a bonus to culture. For Persia, I got a miniature quest chain that rewarded me for sending one of my Immortals on his own little hero's journey. And the crises that happen at the Age transitions – which can be anything from barbarians at the gates to a super plague that wrecks tiles – are varied and exciting. I'm pretty sure I haven't even seen all of them yet.
The re-imagining of smaller eras as three larger, more distinct Ages with their own mechanics and victory conditions feels a bit too broad, though – particularly the middle one, Exploration. This period stretches from basically the end of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and it feels like it's trying to cover too much to have a coherent identity.
And, peculiarly, Civ 7 only really covers history up to about 1950. You get planes and tanks, but there are no home computers or helicopters in this tech tree at launch. The final science victory condition is launching the first manned spaceflight – quite a step back from setting up an exoplanet colony. Again, it feels like the conceptual space Civilization exists in has been sliced down to the bone for the sake of simplicity. And it leaves us with some awkward edge cases, like the Mughal Empire, which was politically irrelevant by the mid-1700s and completely dead by 1857, being a Modern Age pick. Even just having four ages instead of three, I think, would have made this much less awkward.
Overall, though, I like the idea of changing which historical culture your civ adopts with each age, an idea that Amplitude introduced in Humankind a few years ago and Firaxis has improved upon by putting semi-realistic restrictions on who you can pick next. I never liked the idea of American tribesmen founding Washington D.C. in the Stone Age, and civ switching shakes up the gameplay and allows you to pivot from military to culture to science without ruining your whole run. But it has its drawbacks, too. Given that Civ 7’s otherwise slick-looking animated leaders don't change at all visually through the Ages, you end up with some confusing situations like having Ben Franklin declare war on you and then having to look up what civ he's actually controlling right now. Persia? Ooookay.
As is tradition, warfare is the most fun way to play, and I love the clever solution of army commanders letting several units ride on their backs to move around the map, then deploying to actually fight. That’s a good compromise between stacks of doom and one unit per tile, and having the commanders be the only ones to earn XP cuts down on micromanaging per-unit upgrades. The AI still can't present much of a challenge to an experienced player who knows how to exploit the terrain and focus fire on priority targets unless they outnumber you three- or four-to-one, but hey, it's Civ. What else is new?
Well, for one thing, when you end your turn all enemy units move at once, and your view will never be taken to the site of a battle when your units are being attacked. So if you’re fighting on multiple fronts, or you just happen to be looking somewhere else, the start of each turn becomes a crime scene investigation to figure out what happened. You’ll get notifications if a unit dies, but not if it’s reduced to its last few hitpoints. If the idea here was to make the end turn time faster, the cure is definitely worse than the disease.
Back in the plus column, the centering of Influence as a base game currency is probably my favorite change from Civ 6 to Civ 7. The highlight is that it can be spent to engage in a tug-of-war for War Support, which penalizes your opponent's happiness and combat ability when you swing it in your favor. It feels way less annoying to get declared on by surprise when the systems recognize that there are diplomatic and tactical consequences for such naked aggression, and I can press a button to make them worse by denouncing that jerk Isabella. It also effectively forces would-be conquerors to supplement their bloodlust with a good PR team that swings public opinion to your side even when you're clearly the aggressor, which makes the military path more interesting.
If conquest isn’t your ambition there is still another "instant" victory condition for winning the space race, but otherwise, the overall winner is determined by these “Legacy Paths” for Military, Economic, Scientific, and Cultural achievements, which have different objectives each Age and don't penalize you for changing up your strategy in each one. I found that they do, however, encourage generalization over specialization, since being declared the winner by total legacy score at the end often comes down to simply completing as many objectives in as many different categories as possible. Conquering a couple cities as a science player or making a few treasure fleets as a culture player is typically the tie-breaker in a close match. And I wasn't crazy about having to dabble in everything to avoid falling behind.
Some paths are better designed than others – I’m looking at you, Culture. Flatly, it's bad. There's no tourism anymore, so it's mostly just about collecting artifacts by racing for a very limited number of dig sites with your explorers or vomiting out so many wonders that your starting cities end up looking ridiculous and the wonders themselves don't feel so singular or special. Then, the religion-flavored Exploration Age culture objectives suck even more. I hope you like missionary spam and endless whack-a-mole conversions that you can’t guard against. There's a little bit of strategy to it, like the fact that each settlement can now have a rural and an urban faith that need to be converted separately, but otherwise it’s just spending production to churn out as many Bible-thumpers as you can. I know we all like to make fun of Civ 6's "theological combat," but at least it was something, right? It was gameplay. This is a chore.
Sure, this whole one step forward, two steps back thing is par for the course when it comes to comparing a brand-new Civ to previous ones with years of patches and DLC to refine them. It's not lost on me that people said the same things about the launch of Civ 5, my all-time favorite of the series. So I have an optimistic outlook on Civ 7, despite all my kvetching – and believe me, there’s a lot more minor grievances I could list. I do think a lot of what bugs me about it could be fixed without redesigning the entire thing. They could add better tooltips and game set-up options in a patch. Civ 6 didn’t let you rename cities at launch either, but that was soon added. And naturally, history teaches us a lot of lacking systems can and probably will be fleshed out in expansions. It's not a great game right now, but I believe it could be with time.
At least it comes out of the gate looking slick. One of the only hills – er, mountains – I will die on is that I really don't like the way mountains look. They kind of remind me of a big pile of rocks, or like a kid's papier mache volcano project they made for science class. They don't have the appearance of a nice, realistic range of snow capped peaks like the ones I can see out my window here in Colorado. I'm also really not a fan of the new board-gamey look for undiscovered territory, even though the reveal effect is nice. Give me clouds or an old-timey map over this shiny nonsense any day.
But the units and cities look incredible, if sometimes a bit cluttered. City-states got a big glow-up, both visually and mechanically. They all have unique 3D dioramas with culturally-specific clothing and props for dozens of miniature "civs" that didn't make the cut, which is kind of incredible considering how many there are, and each can grant you a unique tile improvement. The way you compete for them, though, has again been streamlined. It's just a race to fill up the suzerain bar first, and you can no longer "steal" them away from another leader once they’re committed. Not that it mattered that much in single-player, since it seemed like the AI was simply not interested in competing for them the vast majority of the time.
There's also some meta progression where you can unlock equippable items for specific leaders or cosmetics like new profile backgrounds for playing the same leader multiple times and completing specific challenges. It's… whatever. I'm not annoyed by its existence, but it could completely disappear and I probably wouldn't notice or care.
But before we wrap up here, where the heck is Gandhi? How are you going to release a Civilization game without Gandhi? To be fair, the quirky leader choices are neat. I like that we're branching out from exclusively executive-level political figures. But come on. That's like Halo without Master Chief, or Mario without… well, Mario. The lack of recognizable faves just comes across to me as, "We're going to sell them to you individually later," even if the intention was simply to vary things up. If that’s the case, why are there two different Napoleons?
