Recent reviews by rb2610

So, I played the demo about 2 weeks ago having never played a Civ game before.

Got home from work, started playing thinking "I'll play this for an hour, see what it's like, then get back to playing something else for the rest of the evening".

Pretty sure it was only 10 minutes later that it's 2am alll of a sudden and I'm thinking "One more turn, then I'll go to bed, for sure this time.". Luckily for my sleeping pattern the demo kicked me off at that point. Safe to say I bought the full game the next day, followed by the full set of expansions a couple of days later.

Clocked up over 40 hours in a week and a bit, and keep on having "just one more turn", I finally see why this series is so damn popular.

In terms of actual review stuff, bearing in mind I'm only a casual player of these sort of strategy games, mostly just played Total War before this:

+Nice graphics and GUI, vibrant and clean.
+Sound is great, I could happily just have the menu music on all afternoon ("TERRA! TERRA! TERRA NOVUM SOMETHING!")
+The AI seems interesting and varied, they make strange decisions at times, but they generally seem to make decent decisions and act consistently within their personality.
+So far only on my third campaign, but there seems to be a massive amount of replayability with different maps, factions and scenarios, plus different victory conditions and the option for randomisations.
+Coming from Total War, the combat is obviously less in-depth than TW's full battles (the upside being that everything else in the game is more in-depth than the Campaign Map aspect of TW). What makes this a plus though is that it still has a great amount of strategy with units having strengths and weaknesses based on their type, plus a huge array of buffs/debuffs based on flanking, terrain, nearby units, bonuses on levelling up etc.

-There didn't seem to be any scenarios in the base game, so without the various DLC there is slightly less replayability to be had. Of course the DLC can all be gotten cheap in frequent sales on Steam and elsewhere anyway.
-The voiceovers in diplomacy could do with a little more variety, that said, they're well done and aren't grating, so can't complain.
-The demo lacked a tutorial, which was baffling since demo players would surely be the most likely to benefit from playing the tutorial. I was able to muddle through it without though, and the 'advisors' got me up to speed quickly enough.

All in all this game is ridiculously addictive, and great fun, a lot better with the complete edition, but even without it's still well worth the purchase. Also, screw you Bismarck.

If you happen to have a guitar or bass lying around that you want to learn and you enjoy rhythm games like playing Guitar Hero and the like, I can't recommend this game enough.

Been playing for a week or two and my neglected guitar is thankful for actually being played for a change, my fingers hate me and I've seen a definite improvement in my playing! If anything it's more addictive than GH or RB as although it's harder, you feel productive playing it, as you're actually learning something useful.

Just make sure to buy a physical copy as you'll need the cable and buying the cable on it's own plus the game on Steam is much more expensive than just getting the cable & game bundle.