The newest edition of the classic 4x franchise videogame arrives... but not without significant problems
One more turn.
That has been the promise and hope and goal of the Civilization games since the very first one in 1991. And Build an Empire to Stand the Test of Time. As you can see, it’s right on the box for that first game. I played that first game, picking it up a couple of years after its release, and not terribly long before Colonization, and Civilization II.
I haven’t looked back since. I’ve played nearly every iteration of it ever since.¹ If I look at my Steam statistics, my #1 game played is Civilization VI. My #2 game is... Civilization V.
I’ve had a lot of fun playing the Civilization games. Cleaning up nuclear waste with Roman legions in Civ 3. Endless network games with my best friend Scott at his house. He had two computers, both set up with Civ 4. And when I would visit, we would play for hours. He always played Germany, always. I rotated civilizations (Rome was common but I liked to play a variety). He was frankly a better strategy player than I was, and beat me more often than I beat him. Endless games of Civ 5 and 6, solo and sometimes with PBEM games, also created emergent narratives. Fights against the perfidious Dutch. Launching nukes as Egypt to keep America from winning the Space Race. And on and on. And that doesn’t even get into the spinoffs.²
But with each of those Civs, the game changed, and now we can start to turn toward the real value of this piece in Civ 7. Sometimes the changes were radical and surprising. The punitive happiness mechanic in Civ 3 that was meant to try and reduce city spam, but often led to frustration. The stacks of doom mechanics in Civ 4. The big change in Civ 5 to a hex-based map and one unit per tile, plus the advent of religion. Civ 6 introduced districts, new civs, and late in its design, new game modes (zombies! and heroes! and barbarians that are there for more than being killed!). There have always been changes and updates, new mechanics, new ideas.
And so we come to Civ 7. To not bury the lede anymore, it feels like a *double* helping of changes, two games’ worth, in one leap from 6. Going from 6 to 7 feels like the change going from 4 to 6. Many in the Civ community have resented how much they have needed to relearn the game.
I don’t want to get too much in the weeds, but the major change that has caused the most social drama is that the it’s now three games in one. Instead of Building an Empire to Stand the Test of Time, it no longer does allows you to do that. You pick a leader... and then you pick a civilization in the Antiquity Age.³
All well and good, if a bit weird. But after a hundred turns or so of gameplay, the Age comes to an end. Your civilization did not stand the test of time, but the future has been prepared for. Based on the leader you picked, the civilization you picked, and other possible factors, you then transition into the next civilization for the next Age. The game doesn’t make this entirely clear, but there’s definitely a historical time gap involved here, and some of the choices, temporal-wise, are a little hinky. But you then proceed through the Exploration Age, which is a different sort of feel than the Antiquity Age... and then you do it all again, for the Modern Age. Same leader, new civilization. And this time, you’re going for a win condition.
So you wind up building a narrative of the rise and fall of civilizations,⁴ keeping the same leader throughout as sort of a “patron deity,” building on your accomplishments from the previous Age, until you’re in the final Age and try to achieve victory.
In my very first game, I picked Augustus as my leader. I started as Rome, of course, and went about my game. I got to the end of the Antiquity Age, surviving its crisis (basically toward the end of each of the first two Ages, a random game-wide problem hits all the players—plague, religious intolerance, barbarians, etc.). I decided to go for Spain in the Exploration Age. This showed off the new map mechanic: you can’t explore the entire world in the Antiquity Age, even if theoretically possible. The “Distant Lands” (New World) also appear in this age. I sent units over there, conquered, expanded... and for the Modern Age, I picked America. And went on to a victory. I’ve played several other full and partial games since, weaving this story of three civilizations and one Patron Deity. The game from which I’ve put these screenshots is me playing as Catherine the Great. I started with Greece, and then, because I had been so militaristic and had enough horses, transitioned to Mongolia in the Exploration Age.
I do like these beginning-of-Age screens. You can see the leader and the civization they are ruling. So yes, that’s Catherine the Great leading the Mongols (when I was playing Greece, you could see an Acropolis behind her).
So is it any good? Is it one more turn worthy?
Yes and no. There have been a lot of arguments about the release schedule and costs of the game and the DLCs planned. It does feel to me that 2K is trying to milk the cash cow here, and that, I think, hurt the development and release of the base game. The UI and appearance of the main game is severely lacking, as well as explanations of some key concepts. Just to give one example: some civilizations can build unique quarters, combinations of two buildings they can create. But the map doesn’t show where you’ve built one already—and if you don’t build it in the right place, you don’t get it. Whoops. Worse, the game doesn’t explain that if you place one of the buildings in a spot with another building, you’re stuck and can’t complete it. Just which things you do and don’t get when you transition Ages is not documented, either. Sure, some of this is a learning curve, but there’s no documentation in the game for it.
There are other things I notice the more I play. Like the maps: they’re built around your starting location, but that leads to “rectangular sameness” for a lot of maps, and some views lack things like navigable rivers. The story beats are good, especially the ones for individual civilizations, but there isn’t enough variety in them. And the game feels a bit incomplete without a couple of hallmark leaders. There is no Gandhi, of the “our words are backed with nuclear weapons,” for instance. Mongolia is here, but Genghis Khan specifically is not.
Which leads me to the Modern Age and the ending of the game. The game ends in the 1950s, with the victory conditions being project-based: build a thermonuclear device, or a world bank, or a world fair, or launch a manned flight. These win conditions are chronologically set much sooner than in previous Civs. You’re no longer trying to go to Alpha Centauri, and nope, no Giant Death Robots. And that’s sort of fine... except that at the end of the game, when you win, the game awards you leader points for the “Next Age”—one that’s not there at all. I’m frankly baffled by this. Was there going to be a fourth Age and they truncated the game? Is another Age coming in in a paid DLC? Is it just unpolished? Any which way, I’m annoyed.
The game does do things that a certain strain of people might consider “DEI,” and it has taken heat for it. Some don’t like the idea of Harriet Tubman as a leader. (She seems to get all the hate; you don’t need me to tell you why. And yes, in the screenshot above, I just declared war on her, because she's way ahead.) The choice of civilizations and leaders is interesting, but as noted above, we don’t get some classic ones that have been in the game for decades. We do get some interesting ones never seen before in a Civ: Aksum, Buganda, Chola, the Mississippians. The game acknowledges the continuity of some areas of the world by giving us a civilization in India and one in China for each of the three Ages. One time, I played as Confucius ruling the Han-Ming-Qing. That might be a pretty good route for a first-time player, as it’s easy to play without weird mechanics.
So should you buy this game? If you’re a super-fan of Civilization, you already did. If you’re a moderate fan of the franchise, I’m going to tell you no. Not yet. Not until the game is more polished, is on sale, and provides a better experience. If you’re new to the Civ franchise, I frankly think you should start with 6 to get to know what a Civ game is like. Sure, it’s 10 years old, and looks it, but it has a lot more to offer. I still play it.
But I’m not abandoning Civ 7. It’s still One More Turn for me. However, when I see gamer YouTubers say they’re “taking a break from Civ 7,” I get worried. And I wonder whether it will happen to me... and if too many people do, what will happen to the game? In this day and age, it’s way too easy to cut losses and not fix problems. I can hope that Civilization VII addresses its weaknesses. There have been many games that have taken a run at this genre. (Hello, Humankind, you had such potential. So sorry, Ara: History Untold, you were underbaked. Millennia... you just sucked badly.) Civilization IS the game-defining franchise for this genre. If they don’t improve and right the ship... there will be a big void in gaming if Civilization VII itself should not stand the test of time. I want it to succeed, but right now, it is most definitely not succeeding.
Nerd Coefficient: 6.5/10.
Reference: Civilization VII [Firaxis, 2K Games, 2025].
¹ The exception, since you might or might not know, is Civilization Revolution, which was never released for the PC. I didn’t have a Playstation 3 or other compatible device for it. So I do not have a perfect record of Civilization games.
² Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, possibly the best 4x game ever made, for example, had the rocket victory from Civ 2 lead you to colonizing Alpha Centauri, facing planetary threats with all-new leaders and ideologies. And there was a *storyline* behind the “good victory,” coming to terms with a planet that was far more than it seemed. And there were some ideas and mechanics there that have never really seen good use or at any use at all since and I wish they had. (You could raise or lower the land, for example. And underwater cities! And of course this idea of a narrative and factions that had some built-in conflicts from the get-go. One of the expansions had two parts of an alien race crash-land... who hated each other’s guts.)
³ You can also start in the Exploration or even Modern Age if you want.
⁴ This is really contentious, because a would-be Civ-killer, Humankind, had you changing civilizations 10 times over the course of the game. That game had a lot of problems, and detractors of that system hate it in Civ 7. But this all goes back to the “Rhyes and Fall” mod of Civ 3 that has influenced this idea that civilizations don’t have to, and shouldn’t, stand the test of time. It’s been around for over a decade, but now it’s really “canon.” And some people HATE that. But even so, said people never thought that I, as America, founding Boston in 2000 BC and going after Genghis Khan as America in 1000 BC, was historically accurate.
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
