Civilization V

Civilization V is the latest installment of the legendary series by Sid Meier. It is a turn-based strategy game, where the player leads his 'tribe' through history, trying to dominate the planet via military, economic, cultural or diplomatic victory. The basic premise and gameplay of the game is the same as in all previous incarnations in the series. However, that is not a negative; it is a well-tested and highly successful recipe. The differences in this version of the game are to be found mainly in the graphics (which are quite polished) and in some aspects of the game's micro-management. This time round, you cannot fiddle with adjusting what percentage of your resources go towards research, gold production etc. This leads to smoother gameplay in my opinion. Also, in Civ V, the system for adopting new civics has been enhanced and is directly related to the amount of culture points you have available. This makes building cultural improvements in your cities a lot more important and is successful in engaging the player more in city-improvement. The diplomacy aspects of the game are still basic, however better than in previous versions. The biggest let-down for me so far, is the fact that the number of available civilisations you can lead has dropped dramatically from Civ IV. Another big disappointment, and what prevents me for awarding Civ V a 5-star rating, are the technical problems many players are having post-release with running the game in DirectX 11. For many players, the game keeps crashing when opting to run it in DirectX 11, although, there is the option to run it in good old traditional DirectX 9, so at least you can play! I hope this issue is soon fixed via patching, but it still indicates a product that has not gone through sufficient quality assurance. These issues aside, the game is highly addictive, and worthy of a very high accolade, whether you are a strategy game fan or not. Even though Firaxis could have done a bit more with available civ options and scenarios (there are no scenarios to choose from in the vanilla version of the game), I believe there will be downloadable content coming soon. You can see that this is really down to marketing strategy, however, as a player and a consumer I feel a bit cheated knowing I will have to pay extra for options that in previous versions of the game were free...Nevertheless, it is definitely one of my favourite games and will be played for a long long time, considering there is also good multi-player suppport. Go buy it!

My Rating: 90%