Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution

Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution

It must have been one of game development’s greatest challenges: condensing the gigantic, epic sprawl of the PC Civilization games into a focused, accessible and fun console version.

For readers unfamiliar with Sid Meier’s popular, world-building sim-games, the premise is simple: pick one of sixteen nations and guide it through ancient history, decade by decade, right up to modern times. Of course, the way in which you play the game and the decisions you make, are what defines your route through history. Your decisions in amassing land, defending borders, invading foreign empires, investing time, money energy and resources into the military or the arts, science or technology come to characterise your civilization.

There are four routes to winning this giant, interactive board game: Domination, when you’ve taken over every one of the other five nations on earth; Economic, when you’ve created the world bank and amassed a fortune in gold; Cultural, when you’ve established the UN or, finally, Technological, when you’re the first nation to take to space and land on Alpha Centuri.

While you’ll tread all four paths in your route to modernity, you’re given almost complete ideological freedom to be the kind of ruler you want to be. You’ll have to build cities, mine resources from the land around you, birth men and women of greatness and create world wonders, but which of these areas you major on is entirely up to you. Will you be a heavy-handed invader or a gentle master of diplomacy? Will you chase after the arts, patronising Shakespeare and crafting structures of beauty and greatness; or will you make a rocket ship and fly into space?

Revolution plays out a little like a boardgame, with defined turns during which you can move all of your troops and units around the globe-like board and place building orders with each of your cities. Find a new place to settle and you can deploy settlers who will establish a new city for you (automatically named after real-life counterparts). Alternatively you can invade a neighboring nation and steal one of theirs.

The move from PC keyboard to console controller has been smooth and efficient: the d-pad is used to switch between units while the left analogue stick directs them around the map. The bumpers provide access to a simple management system for cities and diplomatic relationships and you can access a huge Wikipedia-style database of information at any time.

Revolution has been trimmed down from the previous PC titles, games lasting from three to four hours rather than weeks. But with sublime multiplayer options, easy to navigate menus and a fun, slick and good-looking art style this is a concentration of the Civilization formula rather than a dilution of it. What emerges is one of the most playable, enjoyable and accessible Sim-games ever conceived.

5 out of 5