There seems to be a sudden rush of real-time strategy games appearing on consoles at the moment, the favourite Command and Conquer, Sega’s disappointing Universe at War and now the new game from Sid Meier, Civilization Revolution.
Civilization Revolution has a great advantage over the previously mentioned games and that is that it has been designed from the start with console gaming in mind, and this really shows, from the presentation to the overall feel and playability.
Revolution in the most recent in the long running series. The basis of the game is to build a world dominating civilization. You can do this by one of four ways, Domination, were you defeat all of the opposing civilisations, Economic, where you have enough money to buy power, Culture, where your own cities reach a level of culture and also Technological where you send some of your loyal people to space and colonise Alpha Centuri.
There are a few modes to choose from, the main single player game, scenarios, online multiplayer and the addition of new download scenarios. Whist the scenarios dictate who you choose, each game is similar. You have a choice of 16 civilizations, each one has their own advantages, The Romans have cheap road building, Germany has more experienced warriors, the Mongolians can join with Barbarian villages and the African warriors can move more squares per turn. Once you have chosen you will be introduced to the game by a helpful chap who will pop up on screen from time to time, rather like the annoying paperclip on Word, but thankfully not as irritating. He will guide you through the first baby steps of creating your civilization but if you have played a few times you can turn him off.
At first you are given some settlers to start you city and long with one group of warriors, initially the world map seems huge, unexplored areas are covered by mist and its up to you to move your warriors a space at a time to learn the lye of the land. Here you will also learn the great addition of the turn based rules, at first I was sceptical on how this would work, but I can say this is a great idea for RTS games and makes for perfect control of all of your characters and resources. At each turn the screen will move to each idle item, here you can command warriors to go forth, galleys to map the coastline and meet strange small cultures and get offered gifts and also set up your city to create new buildings, make new Wonders of the World like the Magna Carta or Stonehenge or just build more units. The research of each new step in technology will be prompted once, you will then choose what you want to concentrate on, Bronze for better weapons, Pottery for culture, each one will have a set amount of turns to be completed, once this is done, more units and buildings are available to create and command and then you can choose the next step. I really like this approach as it enables you to concentrate on your character movements rather than getting bogged down in deciding the pro’s and cons of research.
As you pay through the game you will meet other cultures, initially you can decide if you want to trade and be peaceful or try and destroy them and take over their cities, if you are unsure on what to do you can select your diplomats and will each give their opinion on the situation. Be warned though, even on the easy setting some cities may get greedy and want some of your power and launch an attack, and here of course you can then retaliate and depending on which era you are currently playing in the game you can overrun them with archers and catapults, artillery, planes and tanks or even nukes, but using these normally turns everyone against you.
Graphically this game is on par with most PC games, the nature of the cities makes them a bit squashed together and therefore not great to look at, but the detail of each character and the animation is great and since you are watching this most of the time you forget about the mess of each city. Revolution has also cleverly avoided the age old problem of in game music, they have gone for a classical approach for the main menu, but in game they have completely removed it, so no more annoying tunes, instead you have the atmospheric noises of the cities and the occasional mumbling and gibberish of the in game helpers.
Games like this normally scare me, the instructions are huge and the menu’s bewildering with so many different options to select and change I would rather not play them. I can say with confidence however that this is a great RTS with plenty of pick up and play appeal, perfect for the console generation, the programmers have really worked hard on this great title and I would love to see more RTS games in this ilk rather than something just cloned from it’s PC counterpart.
