Civilization IV (PC) > Reviews > One of the greatest game series ever

Author's product rating:   

Playability & Enjoyment	Excellent - very playable game
Graphics	Excellent
Sound	Excellent - makes full use of my speakers
Difficulty & Complexity	A difficult game - needs a lot of patience

Advantages:	Civilization at its best yet
Disadvantages:	Very high system requirements on higher modes

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

First off, if you like games to be simple and not require undue process of thought, go play something else. The Civilization games are equalled in complexity only by some Manager-type games perhaps, though those do not come nearly as close to Civ4 in scope.

If you're new to Civ (as the series is commonly abbreviated), the premise basically is that you are in control of a nation/race of people on the earth, such as the Romans/Aztecs/Americans/Russians. You guide your people from the stone age all the way through to the present day, building cities, advancing in technology, creating wonders of the world, building armies to fight your rivals, and so on. As I'm sure you can imagine, the scope is HUGE. If you've never heard of Civilization before then I really do recommend it - its a serious contender for the greatest game series ever.

There's no question of Civ's greatness - the question is, how does Civ4 compare to the previous Civ games?

Among a host of small changes far too numerous to list here, the two biggest changes a veteran Civver will notice are the brand new combat system, and the implementation of religion. In previous Civ games combat was worked out with a basic system of Attack and Defence values for each type of military unit. Some units, like Riflemen, Spearmen etc., would be better at defence, while others such as Tanks or Knights would be better when attacking. This has been scrapped, and now all units have a generic "stregnth" value, which is then modified in certain situations. For example, Archers (S3) have a stregnth bonus when defending in cities or on hills. Spearmen have a bonus when attacking or defending against mounted units, and so on. All in all this makes a much more complex, realistic and interesting combat system that encourages the player to build lots of different units for all eventualities.

The second major change is religion. Now, the first person to research certain technologies will found a new religion (Christianity comes with Theology, Islam with Divine Right for example). There are seven different religions (all real-world ones). The different religions will spread in your cities, making people happier. Once a religion has enough following in your civ, you can set it as your state religion, which will make other nations with that religion as their state religion like you more, but make nations whose state religion is different want to cleanse the world of your heathen filth! You can also spread the religions manually by way of temples, missionaries and so forth.

Smaller changes include the replacement of the old governments with a Civics system similar to that featured in the earlier Civ-type game Alpha Centaurii, where one can choose particular changes to make to different aspects of your government. This gives a lot more scope for customisation - wheras previously you would be made to choose for example between Democracy and Communism, now you could have an elected Fascism, Socialism, free-market dictatorship, a communist regime with free press... there are 25 different combinations - compare that with the 5 governments of Civ3, and you can see how much the game has improved! Other changes include a drastic change of the way corruption and waste works in your cities (so that now, bigger isn't necesserially better, and expansion can in fact slow your developement if in doing so you have to look after lots of weak cities).

Not everything however has improved from previous games - veterans will notice that, though there are some completely new units in this game, some old favourites have disappeared: Paratroopers, Transport Helicopters, AEGIS cruisers have all departed since Civ3. Several of these are likely to come out in an expansion soon, however that's kindof annoying because it shows how Firaxis only released half a game in the first place.

Lastly, the graphics. Obviously one expects graphics to improve with time (normally I wouldn't bother to mention them in such a review), but this set is really worth mentioning: you can zoom in and out of your empire, stretching back to viewing the world as a rotating sphere in space, or zooming right down to where you can hear the traffic in your cities. You can rotate your view around the map, tilt it up and down - when you fight battles, the camera zooms in so you can watch the conflict ensue.

Oh, and one last thing - this is the most moddable Civ yet: although the high graphics standard will make lots of options beyond the abilities of most gamers, there are some people out there who have done all sorts of crazy things to this game. The replayability consequently is HUGE.

All this of course comes at a price: the immense complexity of this game may put off bigginers, and the high level of graphics mean that even relatively new computers will have serious speed issues on the higher levels. My own computer cannot play the game on any maps larger than Small, and even that with low graphical settings - considering that is the third smallest size setting of about 7 different ones... do not buy this unless you have a good computer.

To conclude however, despite a number of small issues, this is still the best Civ yet.