Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution (PS3)
Playing a round in most installments of the Sid Meier’s Civilization series can be a complicated but engrossing prospect, it easy to get sucked into building up your civilization and realizing hours passed during the management of it. Time isn’t always a luxury though, and players tend to spend less time sitting at a television playing a game than they do a computer, so for a while the Civilization series didn’t make the jump to consoles. However, with Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution the strategy game would be built from the ground up for systems like the PS3 and Xbox 360, distilling the core ideas of building and maintaining a civilization into something more accessible and swifter to reach a satisfying endpoint.
In Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution you begin a round of play by picking from a set of 16 historical civilizations all represented with a caricature of a recognizable figure associated with them. Having Abraham Lincoln for the U.S.A., Gandhi for India, Mao Zedong for China, and Montezuma II for the Aztecs is more to give a face to a civilization as they’ll be able to rule from 4000 BC up to 2100 AD, but they do give a reactive character portrait so when there are negotiations or declarations of war there is someone on screen backing up such things with a bit of emotion. The main consideration for your civilization choice beyond things like the aesthetics of buildings that will be constructed are the special bonuses each one has, many of these fairly small like having specific soldier types or understanding a form of technology before other civilizations do, but there are perks to each one across the different eras of development and certain ones certainly favor the different victory conditions you’ll be aiming for.
The goal of Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution isn’t merely to survive, as there are four ways to earn a win. Players are placed on a map with four other civilizations they’ll be competing against, and perhaps the most straightforward but not at all easy way to achieve victory is simply to win wars against them and take their capitals for a Domination victory. If you aren’t interested in being a warmonger, you can also try to outpace the competition in your understanding of science, eventually launching a spacecraft to head to other star systems for a Technology win. Simply accruing enough gold as currency over the course of the game will earn you the Economic win, but if you focus more on cultivating the arts you can generate enough great works and people to dominate the cultural landscape of your small world with a Cultural victory. Giving different angles of attack for how you can try and achieve a win not only guarantees some variety in how you make choices in how you build up your cities and how you allocate resources, but it also means that someone getting a good lead in one area might not necessarily earn them a win since other civilizations can pursue alternate routes to victory. There also is the interesting interplay of trying to maintain your work on your pursuit of choice while holding back the others aiming for their win condition, so even if you want to be the rich ruler of the world, sometimes that cash might have to go towards building defenses or buying knowledge from other cultures.
While there are lofty ambitions to pursue for that victory, Civilization Revolution keeps things breezy early on. You need to settle your first city and you likely won’t have too many extra ones going due to limited map space and the diminishing returns in settling too many of them, so picking your first spot is vital to success and can even lead to a quick loss if you don’t have a good place to put down roots. The most important aspect of civilization settling are the tiles around your city center as they determine much of your capabilities. Spaces provide different resources that help your city grow, a more populous city able to expand out to new spaces, a more productive city able to build helpful buildings more quickly, a science-leaning city able to research new innovations and inventions like writing and gunpowder, and some cities able to convert nearby resources into gold that can help fund things like roads or hurrying up construction. Cultivating a city can involve changing its focus on which resources it’s currently utilizing, but in this turn-based game, you won’t often need to fiddle with things too much. Your cities can all have one construction project going at a time, so building something helpful like a barracks to improve soldier strength or market to increase gold income ends up a weighty decision that impacts your city’s growth. Some projects take multiple turns to complete, but once a city gets to work on one you can often ignore its concerns unless something pressing comes up like a war.
Cities are also responsible for producing all troops you want to send out, be they scouts just to get a lay of the land or people built to fight back other armies. The maps in Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution are unfortunately randomly chosen for a play session so you can’t challenge yourself with unique layouts, but you still need to push out into the cloud-covered unknown to see more of the map and encounter other civilizations. Fighting barbarians or finding historical sites can provide goodies as well, and soon you’ll likely find yourself needing to fight battles across land and sea against other civilizations since the AI players seem particularly prone to declaring war over trivial things. Different difficulties do allow for some cooling of the AI’s heels in this regard, but even civilizations you barely know might declare war on you just as a bid to squeeze some gift from you even though they pose no threat at the moment. When battles do go down though, it involves one set of your troops facing off with a set of your enemy’s troops rather than large full scale conflicts. In these one-on-one battles between small squads, different types of soldiers have different advantages and perks, this especially changing over time as new weapons become available to them. Still, whether it’s archers, catapults, gunmen, or battleships, the fight between the two opposing sides isn’t just a matter of strength. A superior force will overrun an enemy that’s far weaker than them, but there is hope for the weaker side to turn back the opposition and win the fight thanks to some small randomization in the outcome, and with other considerations like fighting on terrain adding little modifiers, you can even hold a position against stronger soldiers if the right factors line up.
A turn ends up becoming mostly about making sure your cities stay busy while your troops either explore or attack the other civilizations, the turns lasting a different amount of years based on how far along in history you are. While a lot of considerations have been mentioned here for how certain things can pan out, in the moment the game provides the information in clean windows and the tutorial in the Play Now form of play also introduces things gradually so you understand them well enough. An in-game Civilopedia can also be cracked open for details on specific units if you forget or want to know their deeper functions, something like a Spy able to perform a few tasks that don’t fit cleanly in small textboxes. The game provides you a set of different advisors as well, although their appearances often make animations play that can struggle to keep up once you have a handle on things and can move quickly through their notifications. Still, Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution runs fairly well most of the time and building up your civilization is a satisfying and gradual process. By the time you have an enormous army to deploy or plenty of cities to set tasks for you’ve already been doing such things on a smaller scale since the start so its easy enough to manage, and watching your cities grow and evolve is a nice payoff to the investments you made in their development.
The competition with other civilizations also gives play unexpected considerations so that you don’t just follow the same growth path with ease every time. For example, Great People from history like Pythagoras or Frederick Douglas can appear that give your city some bonus to their resources or ability but their appearance is random and others can try and take them from you. Wonders on the other hand include famous landmarks and buildings that all provide unique bonuses, so establishing Oxford University, constructing Stonehenge, or starting the Apollo Program all provide great boons provided that some other civilization doesn’t beat you to the punch. Some even lose their efficacy over time so it’s a question of how much of an investment you want to put into something that provides momentary bonuses, the game again able to add interesting strategy to simple decisions since this layers in with how you allocate your city’s construction time. One interesting extra layer present in Civilization Revolution though is a museum-like display where you can later view the wonders and people you acquired across different play sessions, trying to complete the collection giving you reasons to pursue such things outside just as a function of reaching your desired victory condition.
A single play session of Civilization Revolution will vary in length, but somewhere between 2 and 5 hours depending on how tough the opposition is and how many things you end up managing can be expected. Save files can be set at any point when you have control and reloaded if you want to go back to an earlier turn, but the game still feels fairly brisk without being shallow because the individual actions you need to take as the manager of your civilization are often very quickly done unless you’re embroiled in a complex conflict. The progression of things like technology limit it so that you can only produce certain buildings at certain times and they build on each other so every now and then you consider what sciences you want to know now and how learning it might help you learn something new related down the line. The actual decision making is a simple process in terms of what is done but has that needed layer of depth to ensure a play session can feel quite different based on the goals of the civilizations involved, although unfortunately the death of online servers for this game means the inevitably more complex and exciting multiplayer is now inaccessible. The AI can still put up a good fight thanks to the difficulty settings giving them different advantages or attitudes, but you can also attempt unique scenarios to spice up the play some. Some of the special scenarios like It’s Money that Matters just give you a city and 1000 gold to start with for an interesting early game boost, but others can feel quite different like Beta Centauri which provides all civilizations with all technological knowledge to start so the early game has far broader options. They’re not quite a replacement for a lost multiplayer component, but they do at least give you a way to freshen up play with elements askew in unusual but entertaining ways.
THE VERDICT: Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution keeps the development of your era-spanning empire quick and compelling by making the breadth of your individual actions each turn manageable while having strategic layers to consider alongside other simple yet important choices. The knock-on effects of your actions are well-explained and easily perceived and with different objectives to shoot for and the selection of altered scenarios on hand there are quite a few valid ways to play so sessions can feel distinct. Being condensed into an easily understood and visually appealing package, this Civilization title keeps its focus on major actions and swift play and knows how to distribute strategic elements so a win is well-earned without the need for micromanagement to keep up.
And so, I give Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution for PlayStation 3…
A GREAT rating. Funnily enough, describing Civilization Revolution can feel a bit like using the necessary broad strokes of a game review for other contemporary Civilization titles. Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution tries to keep things clear cut and focused, concerns that rely on hidden info or esoteric conditions not really cropping up as relevant information is usually presented properly and the impact or purpose of individual parts are more elements of a tactical spiderweb than complexity sinks themselves. This isn’t saying the other Civilization games were guilty of this per se, but it’s fairly easy to quickly consider what you need and make your decisions in a turn. It is a shame some of the game’s luster was lost due to online-only multiplayer dying out, but finding the right set-up for your AI opposition can still lead to engaging battles to try and come out on top that require adjusting your plans as they introduce unique setbacks to your activities. The war-hungry nature of the AI can be a bit too much at times, more so when they’re hounding you needlessly rather than providing actual interesting impediment to your growth with meaningful aggression, but they still add the necessary shakeup to your civilization planning and growth as their own expansionist goals inevitably come in conflict with yours. The extras like the collection to work towards give some purpose to things beyond just playing for the fun of trying to build up an empire, but mostly Civilization Revolution nails the excitement of building up your civilization from humble beginnings even when it has streamlined away considerations from other installments in the series like maintenance costs and resource trading.
Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution isn’t a worse Civilization game, it’s just one setting out with a different purpose. Quicker and cleaner, it provides the satisfaction and challenge of establishing an effective empire in a manner more similar to a board game than a complex computer game. It’s probably little surprise that the troop conflicts feel like something akin to the world conquering board game Risk then, but Civilization Revolution still has many more considerations than who you throw your soldiers at. Amusing animations and interactions, strategic swerves, and long term payoffs give the game life beyond those quick choices made on each turn, building yourself up into a global superpower an engaging experience because there is a good sense for providing a range of meaningful options that interact in clear and compelling ways.