Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy

Players: 1-6 Competitive (Local Alternating), 2-5 Competitive (Local Wireless)

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Review:

Civilization VI is the latest in the long-running and highly-celebrated series of Turn-Based Strategy games where players build and expand their historically-based but anachronistic empire in various ways in competition with other nation-states, with the ultimate goal being the first to reach one of multiple win conditions.

I feel like I need to do some prefacing here. I thoroughly enjoy strategy games, from RTS games like Starcraft, to turn-based strategy games like Fire Emblem, to strategy-RPG games like Disgaea. I have never liked Civilization, and I have given the series multiple good tries.

It gives me no pleasure to write a negative review for a game that I know some people love. Some will undoubtedly say I just don’t “get it”, that it just “isn’t for me”. Well, you can argue any game I give a negative review was one I didn’t “get” or “wasn’t for me”. I can only ever speak about my own personal experience with the game I played.

First, the good: this game has a fantastic presentation, most notably in the sound department, with a wonderful, stirring soundtrack (although it gets fairly minimal during actual gameplay), and great voice-over narration. The graphics are pretty decent as well, with a good amount of detail filling in the hex-based maps and depicting individual units as they move across the map.

As for the gameplay, I have always felt that the Civilization series is fairly impenetrable for newcomers looking to learn how it works. The game has players earning multiple resource types without fully explaining what all of them do, it has them choosing skill tree paths and upgrades without explaining their full benefits, and for the clearly very complex systems at work in the game, its tutorial feels like it absolutely rushes through them without ensuring that the player fully understands how they work.

As such, as with every other time I have tried to crack the Civilization series, my experience was one of frustration, confusion, and bewilderment. No doubt series fans will just tell me I’m too dumb to understand how this game works, but if someone like me, who enjoys other strategy games, can’t figure this game out, I can’t imagine the average person doing so.

The other issue with the Switch version specifically is that there’s no online multiplayer in this game, which I’m sure really limits the options for the more diehard series fans specifically.

Here’s the kicker… I started this by saying I was giving Civilization VI a bad review… but I’m actually not doing that. I’m giving this game a “C” grade. Average. I can see that there are some complex systems at work here that will be rewarding for someone who is willing to put in the time to study the gameplay like a college exam, and for those players, this will probably prove to be an incredibly rewarding experience. But for most, I imagine they’ll find this just as frustrating as I did, if not more so.

tl;dr – Civilization VI is a Turn-Based Strategy game that has players building up their empire to meet one of multiple win conditions before their opponents do. There’s a great presentation and a lot of impressively complex game systems here, but the gameplay is virtually guaranteed to confuse the heck out of anyone who isn’t already indoctrinated into the series. If you love the Civilization, you probably already have this and don’t need a review. If not, I highly recommend you stick with other strategy games – they’re far easier to get into.

Grade: C

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