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Having a wallet so empty that tiny bats had taken up residence inside, I was faced with a difficult choice of purchases today. Having to choose between Battlefield: Bad Company, GRID or finally, Civilization Revolution for the Xbox 360 was a gut-wrenching decision – one that was nearly impossible to make.

Finally, against much beating over the head by my brother (and partially to spite him) who wanted to play Battlefield, I decided to pick up Civilization Revolution. After a day of playing with it and then the Battlefield demo, all I can say that it was the right decision.

Hit the jump to read more.

The concept of playing a Strategy game on a console is one that I loathe fundamentally – but as it turned out, this was a largely mistaken assumption. Although Real Time Strategy does flounder about like a beached whale, Turn-Based Strategy does actually have a market on the console – if it is built around the controls from the ground up, as Civilization Revolutions (CivRev) proves.

If you don’t know what Civilization (Civ) is for some reason (like being a hermit on a mountain somewhere), allow me to give a very brief primer: you pick a civilization, pick a timeframe ranging from ancient to modern; expand your civilization via a host of different cities, settlers and armies till you have finally achieved the ultimate goal of taking over the world!

At the end of the day, that is what Civ is all about – coming out on top, taking over the world and winning. While this end-goal is certainly nothing new in the realm of Turn-Based Strategy games (or Real Time Strategy for that matter), the way the Civ series executes it is unique and interesting.

In the previous installments, victory conditions varied from having the most culture / diplomacy, to achieve the highest tech level and reaching Alpha Centauri. I’m not going to go too deep into details though - this isn’t a wikipedia article after all! All that you need to know is that the series has a fun, unique way of going about the entire deed of lording over the Earth. CivRev is where this system actually changes a fair bit though.

Before going deep into the mechanics of this game though, lets get some of the more obvious stuff out of the way first. First off: graphics. If you’re looking for awesome realistic graphics, you should really be playing Crysis or Battlefield: Bad Company. That said though the graphics in CivRev is pretty darn neat. It’s focused more on style and artistic value and fits in the style of the entire game quite well, making it a fluid and almost dynamic experience.

The next bit is the one that really gets to me the most about the game: the controls. I expected some fairly clunky and difficult to handle controls – and at first it even felt that way. But I have say; Firaxis has done a pretty damn fine job of the controls here. Their smooth and intuitive – even though nearly all the buttons are used, it never feels overwhelming no matter how many units you have to move around.

The sticks move the view around (one does it slowly, while the other lets you race across the map), the D-pad lets you select units in a stack and switch between all the units on the game map. The right trigger brings up the status of your Civilization right now, while the bumpers bring up the City menu and the diplomacy menu for the left and right bumper respectively. The majority of the commands are done via the four buttons as standard, but again it never really feels overwhelming – which is a really a prime example of the overall game play.

CivRev, at its core is really a simplification of the entire Civ series and mechanism - but it’s not an over simplification either. To give a brief context: in Civ III, at its near-extreme length it was entirely possible for a game to last weeks. That’s right. Not days. Weeks! This was with turns that took an entire day to complete just for issuing orders and handling a Civilization with dozens of cities – all the while strategizing and dealing with the randomness that comes with war across two or three powers and juggling diplomacy with others. Civ IV cured this hecticness somewhat, but even it remains a bit complicated and difficult for newcomers to the genre.

This is where CivRev excels. Although I only played on the mid-difficulty level (”I R strategy weakling, so sue me”), the game easily completed in the span of a few hours. The entire system and mechanic has been refined and simplified; while a lot of things that used to make the old Civ games frustrating have been removed. While turns still can potentially last a long time, it still won’t last as long as the old games used to – especially that of the victory conditions which revolves largely around the core of CivRev: the cities.

Cities are the focus point of Rev, much like in the previous game. However, managing them could have been a chore back then – especially when you wanted to put all the workers and tiles and had dozens of cities to manage. Civ IV improved it a lot, while CivRev took it a step further. Here, the amount of cities you have to control will never go above 10-12 at the extreme maximum (at least from my experience thus far), depending on a good game – and even then, managing them is quite easy.

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By N2H

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