After playing for a bit, I wrote an impassioned negative review that was too long to post here. I gave it some time, had some friends read it to offer perspective, and came back to finish my game. I've decided I was right on about 85% of things, and a bit hasty to judge on the other 15%. Rather than being emotional, I've summarised the key takeaways below.


There is certainly some good to be found here. The game has some of the essential Civilization elements. It has Christopher Tin's stunning composition as the main theme, and the civilisation scores are excellent too. It has an excellent narration by Gwendoline Christie. The heavy hitters in game design have returned - Ed Beach as a game designer who has been doing fantastic work since V Brave New World.

The map has a new feel that strikes a balance between V's gritty realism and VI's vibrant clay style to create a grounded-in-reality, but not depressingly so, look. As a result, wonders are more varied and beautiful than ever before.

But that is, unfortunately, where the good ends.


The bad are things I believe can be fixed. First, it is quite clear the game is unfinished. This manifests in two ways: a horrible and inconsistent user interface and a complete lack of information. The UI should be one seamless experience; despite the game having a lovely wood-and-brass board game-esque design, the amount of formatless black squares with white text on it is shameful, throughout the game. What precious menus or reports or information you do get come in screens that are mostly blank space. For example, your natural resource management will have you breaking your mouse scroll wheel with going up and down a massive list with huge empty space either side rather than a simple one-screen window with slots. This also contributes to the lack of information: so many tooltips are gone, and even those that remain struggle to even work, and worse still the information presented in them is all in white text with the same font size so you have to read everything to figure out what you wanted in the first place. The Civilipedia is useless, with it being obsessed with telling you the real world history and absolutely fresh nothing of actual game mechanics. Then, there are so few options in the menu, the worst for me being no UI sliding scale so I could either have massive, eye-wateringly huge or itty-bitty, get-out-your-microscope tiny. All of this gives you a terrible play experience and a sense this isn't a finished product - of course, I'm sure will all be patched.

Secondly, there's things that are flat out gone from the game and with no real reason why. A glaring omission is the complete lack of almost all the great people we've come to love. No great writers, artists, musicians, no great scientists, prophets, merchants, no great engineers. The next is the lack of Civilisations and Leaders. Given they are split up this time, you have to give us more than the paltry amount we usually get at launch. Sure, 30 (VII) is more than 20 (VI) but for reasons you'll see below, this is actually only effectively half what we got in in VI (I know the mathematics doesn't check out but please trust me).

Finally, our consideration of the bad (which I believe still could be fixed) comes to city size. All buildings take up physical space now; gone are the days of all the buildings being put into the city hex or just a handful of districts. As your population grows, they work tiles directly ("Rural population", which replace workers). As your city builds buildings, they need to be built on "Urban" tiles (which creates "Urban population"). Similarly to VI, wonders also take up full hexes. The end result is you're trying to cram a fully unstacked city into the usual V or VI three hex radius. That is laughably bad. My capital city ran out of space in the Antiquity era. I guess that's why they offer you to change your capital every new era. Sure, they have also introduced the idea of 'overbuilding', where old era buildings no longer function and need to be modernised by new era technologies, but as the number of buildings keeps increasing in each era (it isn't a simple 1-to-1 replace the old with the new situation), you will run out of room. The comical thing about this is your city will be built to the absolute brim of the 3 hexes and then there's lovely lush terrain on the literal fourth hex radius free for construction but oh no that's the forbidden lands, you can't possibly build there! In any case, this game design might validly force a 'wide' empire, rather than a 'tall' one, but then they've introduced settlement caps too, so both playstyles feel hamstrung and stymied.


So that brings us to our final stop aboard the RMS Titanic that is VII - those things so ugly, so odious, that they fundamentally break the game; that cannot be patched or updated away due to their being a core part of the game. Here it is: the game feels unlike Civilization in too many ways. The "60-40" rule, where 60% is the same and 40% is different this time appears to be round the wrong way. I'm going to break this into three core reasons:

First, VII is not one game. It is three, bite-sized games. No longer do you play from the research of agriculture to the near-future. The game instead forces you to play through three mini campaigns, one in "Antiquity" which is so nebulous as to be nonsensical because it spans over 3,500 years of history. The next set in the age of "Exploration", which a massive leap from Antiquity to forget over 1,000 years of history. Finally, there's one set in the "Modern" era, which basically covers just the most recent 300-ish years of human history. This makes the pacing feel horrible - you finish one era with swords and bows and start the next with guns! Then you finish with guns and start with howitzers! It is jarring and uncomfortable. Worse still, each game is actually siloed off - you are kicked out to the main screen to start the new era. There is no "just one more turn in this era please!" I was in the middle of a war in Antiquity: all of that progress is deleted at the end of the era - all your units are deleted and a handful of new ones spawn in various city centres, all build queues are reset, research trees are replaced, governments are reset and replaced. All that remains was the location of your cities. This is basically the worst way possible to copy HUMANKIND's homework. Era switching in HUMANKIND is handled incomparably better. I'm working on updating my HUMANKIND review in light of this, please feel free to read more there. But, key to know for this review, HUMANKIND has 6 eras which much more closely follows actual human history (no ridiculous technological leaps) and it too launched with 10 cultures per era for a total of 60! Double the squalid amount in VII because of 100% more eras. If VII wants to make horrible pacing, at least have a representative amount of civilisations for all of history, not just those three deemed worthy to be included.

Secondly, the game is now an RPG. It has quests and a quest journal and victory conditions that are tied to tick-boxes (in all eras). There's no freedom in achieving success in your own way, just do what the game has determined is the 'right' way to win.

Finally, I call it 'whacky anti-consumer s**t'. Twitch drops. Event rewards. Brand collabs. Customisation options. Gameplay unlocks. What's next, a Civilization VII battle pass? We had time-limited challenges in VI. The World Summit livestream makes me confused: are they trying to launch an esport!? All of this is designed to play on FOMO; keep you glued to the game, always engaged, always playing. It makes me like the game less, respect the game less; it feels more corporatised, more designed for management KPIs and shareholder presentations than for fun.

And that's inevitably where we arrive, isn't it? Fun.

Well, you won't find it here.