There are few video game franchises as brave with each new entry as Sid Meier’s Civilization. You might not think it, but pause and give it some thought and you’ll realize that one of Civ’s closest bedfellows is, of all things, Final Fantasy. Both series’ essentially chuck out everything and start over with each new entry, but certain tropes, traditions, and concepts remain steadfast. In both cases, every now and then an entry comes along that really shakes things up. Civilization 7 is one of those games.
This can be for good and for ill. While this write-up is about my opinion, I rather expect broader opinion on this latest Civ to be at least a little polarized. Making big changes always brings with it the danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For the majority of my first save, this is precisely what I feared had happened with Civ 7. But then something magical happened: it began to click. Then it really clicked. The ‘one more turn’ magic is intact – it’s just different this time around.
To some degree to talk about Civ 7 is to talk about what it changes. At its heart it’s still a game about building a civilization that stands the test of time – from the ancient era, growing in size, knowledge, and culture over the ages. Your campaign is still executed across those four eX’s that give the ‘4X’ genre its name: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. Though as always, in Civ, that last one is optional: there are many ways to victory, of which war is only one. Point is, that core is the same.
Scratch beyond and this becomes wildly different. The biggest changes are tightly intertwined: one is only really justified with the other. The ‘eras’ that each run is divided into have been cleaved down to just three – Antiquity, Discovery, and Modern. Instead of playing one Civilization for the entire game, this three-act structure allows for a minor reset, with you picking a new Civilization for each era. The Romans aren’t still around today, so they don’t make sense as a Modern era Civ, right? But if you chose to play as Rome earlier on, the remnants of their culture will remain even in your modern era Civilization.
This leads to an interesting tilt to progression: the path through the game is far less set. In previous Civs, if you picked America, you knew what units and the like you’d be moving towards in the late game. Here the civilization setup is malleable, and like in real life what you have in the modern era will be a mix of everything that came before rather than the pre-defined endgame version of a Civ you chose hundreds of turns ago. In a sense, it also mirrors real life more closely. If I walk around my hometown and the surrounding countryside, the culture is not just ‘England’ – it’s bit’s of Viking, bits of Roman province, bits of Celt, and so on. Civ 7 can now reflect this more accurately.
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Matching up to this choice is decoupling leaders from the Civilizations. Your leader does remain with you all game – but that means you can be playing as Benjamin Franklin and leading Rome or Mongolia. Each leader has their own buffs and predilections which will lead to them having natural matches of the civs. Franklin of course fits brilliantly with America in the modern era – but he also has unique synergy with some unexpected matches throughout history. The same is true for each of the twenty launch civs. In addition, a handful of civs have two versions representing two eras of their life – like Napoleon as a revolutionary, and Napoleon as an Emperor.
These systems are complicated enough that I could wind on talking about them for paragraph after paragraph, but that’s a good thing. There’s a delightful synthesis in how each decision pings across to the other. Your actions in one era will interface with your choice of leader and initial civ to help inform the civilizations you’ll get to choose from in the second era, and then the same again in the third. The civs you choose will obviously affect the way you play the game, too. Each era now isn’t just a shift in technology, but a pivot point for the tone and style of the whole game. It took a while to click, but it’s a knotty complexity I’ve come to really enjoy.
Except… oh, except. But. The worst word. Some of the execution is a little strange. If I might drive into a bit of developmental speculation, I expect the era split was devised not just for satisfying game design, but also with technology in mind. Each era is literally distinct. As you exit one era and transfer to another the game decamps, unloading and then loading into the next era. Things like settlements carry over, but other things do not. It’s a weird mish-mash, like a soft reset of the game state.
Or to put it another way: it’s no longer possible to have a Warrior from 2000BC still cutting about the map in the age of mechanised infantry. Units are one of the things that get refreshed from age-to-age. The game does some calculations in the background based on what you have and military units will either despawn, or be reborn in a new form that’s more appropriate for the new era back at your cities. All surviving armies are sent back to your settlements, which means any war fronts are obliterated by the era shift – but that’s okay, because any wars currently being prosecuted are instantly settled at the end of an era. Each era begins with the world blissfully at peace.
I think this is going to become the sticking point for many. In one sense, the consequences from one era to the next are greater in the form of the stacking civs in a layered version of world history – but in another, the soft reset of an era switch truly augments the flow of the game. Some will say it softens it. The flip argument is this: if you know the reset is coming, you can play that to your advantage. A basic example might be rushing to nab a few settlements from an enemy right at the end of an era, because the instant peace would mean you get to keep them. The victim of this play might start the next era mega angry at you, but you’d no longer be at war – and could then quickly spend diplomatic capital to calm them down. That sort of thing.
Nevertheless, like I say, I can’t help but feel like this choice was made for technological reasons. 2K and Firaxis ported Civilization 6 to absolutely every platform imaginable. It’s on high-end PCs, and phones, and Switch, and bloody Netflix. On some of these platforms, the enormous number of possible variables in the late game means it gets… rough. The late game on Civ 6 for Switch can easily become borderline unplayable. By dividing the eras up and more tightly controlling what can be present in each era with soft resets and forced upgrades, you get something a little more bite-sized for all platforms – but hardcore civ heads on PC will also have to live with it.
Sometimes it does get a little silly. AI civs declaring war on me just a few turns before the end of an era – which happened to me three or four times in the review period – turns what would’ve been a game-changing disaster in a previous game into a non-concern here. But overall it does work – I just think it takes time to click, and perhaps a little time more for an established civ fan like me to accept the change. In the end, I began to accept the slightly separated nature of Civ 7’s eras and in time embraced them, adjusting the tempo of my play to exploit those dividing lines.
There’s a deft attempt to thread a particularly narrow needle here – retaining the crunchy mechanical depth of Civilization while making the game viable to be played in smaller chunks and on weaker platforms. We can see the same in the victory conditions, which are now broadly framed in quest lines for each era. This gives a more specific thread that the less certain can follow through each era, while experienced players can ignore it. The military victory condition on the quest isn’t actually to conquer every other civ, for instance – but doing so skips the quest requirements and also triggers a military victory. It’s through completing these objectives that golden ages can be earned, taking the different form of perks that you choose between each of the ages.
Streamlined is perhaps the watchword. The same is true of the tech tree and the civic trees, each sliced down into a trio of era-appropriate options, but then even within that there’s a narrowing from Civ 6. What I’d say, however, is that this doesn’t come over as dumbed down or retrograde – it’s a shift of focus in where the game wants to place its depth. Like I say, much comes from the new system of building from era-to-era, from civ-to-civ. As much as added as is taken away, both on paper and in practice.
Is Civilization 7 better than Civilization 6? Or 5? Well, no. Obviously not. But let me stop you right there: these games never really are. Civilization was a service game before service games existed. Back in the day it used to grow through expansions. Another games critic joked to me, “Civilization 7/10 until the expansions land,” and while it’s a flippant comment like all of the best jokes there is a kernel of truth to it. The most important thing with a ‘base’ Civilization game is that the foundations are strong. These foundations are arguably the most different in some 20 years – but they feel up to code. They’re sturdy.
I eye some of the included content with a touch of cynicism, it’s true. There’s a fascinating selection of leaders, for example, that the caveman-minded among the audience might consider ‘woke’. More than that nonsense, though, I can’t help but think the lack of some series staples is a little bit cynical. Put the interesting, off-beat choices in the main game, then hold back staples for DLC. If you want Shaka Zulu, or Montezuma, or even the nuke-loving scamp that is Ghandi, you’ll eventually have to open your wallet. That’s just leaders, too. It’s baffling to me that Great Britain, one of the largest empires in history, isn’t represented at all in the base version of this game that’s about building empires. That’ll be added as paid DLC in March. I’m all for interesting and inclusive choices – but come on, folks.
These are relatively inconsequential quibbles, though. I have already accepted the conceit that this is a game that will grow over time. Plus, the content included in the base game is generous enough – there’s plenty to do and experience. A new service gamey style level up system where you can unlock buffs and bonuses in one playthrough that can be taken through to another adds a greater wrinkle of progression and replayability than was in previous Civs. DLC will be judged on its own merit in time based on its content and price – but what ships at launch is decent. Just don’t think I don’t see what you’ve done with some of these picks, Firaxis.
In the end, it all works – it’s just very different. The subtle whiff of compromise in order to launch the game far and wide is there – but compromise is just fine if the end result works. It does. I’m happy. As someone who has somewhere in the region of a thousand hours logged across Civ 4, 5, and 6, I’m ready to add hundreds more to that tally in the seventh entry. Some of that will come in years as the game grows and expands, as is Civilization tradition. But the point is, the foundations here are firm. The legend of one desperate extra turn, over and over again, forever, is secure.
Civilization 7 launches February 11, 2025, for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. This game was reviewed on PC with code provided by the publisher.