Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution (Xbox 360)

After the recent spate of strategy games emerging on the Xbox 360 and other consoles, it was only a matter of time before the Civilisation series found its way onto consoles, while veterans of the series may be excited by this prospect; there really isn't anything to make them excited about.

Just like any other Civilisation game, you start in the Stone Age and have to slowly build your way up to be the greatest civilisation in the ...
...calms down the action if you or the enemy are making a huge attack which would usually be fun to play on a real time strategy game. You can win by doing any of 4 different things, by domination where you have to aggressively capture enemy capital cities, by Economic where you have built up a massive amount of gold and then built the World Bank wonder in a city, by Cultural where you have had some many Great People and then built the United Nations ... more

After the recent spate of strategy games emerging on the Xbox 360 and other consoles, it was only a matter of time before the Civilisation series found its way onto consoles, while veterans of the series may be excited by this prospect; there really isn't anything to make them excited about.

Just like any other Civilisation game, you start in the Stone Age and have to slowly build your way up to be the greatest civilisation in the world. Unlike other strategy games, this one is turn-based which calms down the action if you or the enemy are making a huge attack which would usually be fun to play on a real time strategy game. You can win by doing any of 4 different things, by domination where you have to aggressively capture enemy capital cities, by Economic where you have built up a massive amount of gold and then built the World Bank wonder in a city, by Cultural where you have had some many Great People and then built the United Nations wonder in a city or finally by a technological victory where you have researched everything and sent a colonization ship to Alpha Centauri. This however is a flaw of the game, there may be a time where you just want to use units aggressively to take over the world but as you cannot turn off any of the victory types, one of your enemies could win a cultural victory or an economic victory before you are able to, it also take a lot more time to get a Domination victory and by the time you are in a position to do it, you are already able to win in every other way.

While playing the main game, the graphics are very good until you tell your men to engage in battle with an enemy. The graphics take a downwards turn with the graphics buggy at times and extremely unrealistic battles which can ruin the experience of a large scale war. The game play however is very good, managing diplomacy with other civilisations can be challenging at times and every game is different no matter how similar the settings are for each game, which brings me neatly to the lack of customizable anything in this game. In other Civilisation games you could choose the map size, map type and the amount of enemy civilisations in the next game, in this one you always play on the same map size and type and always play against 4 other random civilisations. Maybe because the console could not handle anymore civilisations but I don't think so because the game hasn't lagged or crashed once while I have been playing it. Also there was on the PC version a 'World Builder' where you could make all of the scenery and set up units so that you could make custom battles to fight, this is also not included on this console version. This seems to hint towards there being a downloadable update or something to rectify this if they want to change it.

The AI are generally very good with them sometimes doing very unpredictable things and launching attacks from places you did not think they were. However, the diplomacy that is included in the PC versions of the game is not included in this one, you cannot be allies with anyone and neither can you be enemies with anyone, whatever you do before is forgotten by the AI and even if as a gift you give them an advanced technology that they do not have as a gift, or you are getting along well with other civilisations for all of the game, they will still all declare war on you if it looks like you are going to win, this can make the game boring at times if you have no one to back you up when you are losing a battle.

Overall though, the game is very good and the few bugs and lack of customizable options are quickly forgotten when you play the game. I would give it an 8/10 because of the lack of things that are included in the PC versions of the game, it is a high number though because of the fact that it is still extremely fun to play even without those features. 

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