theSchap's Blog

This post is going to be a del­i­cate merger of ‘Great Games to Poop to’, and ‘Review’.

Who: Devel­oped by Firaxis Games, and Pub­lished by 2k Games.

What: Turn Based Strategy

Where: Earth over the course of human history.

When: Avail­able now on the app Store for $4.99

Why: Deep game­play, and a fran­chise I enjoy on my hand­held. Good times.

To sum this up in two words… great adap­ta­tion. I think the Civ­i­liza­tion series is one of the most deep and com­plex fran­chises that I have ever played. There’s some­thing about a Civ­i­liza­tion game that hooks you in no way any other game can. Maybe it’s just me, but I will put down a Civ­i­liza­tion game, and then a cou­ple years later, I have this unhealthy urge to play one again. I think these games dig deep into a person’s Psy­che, around the same region that con­tains OCD, micro­man­age­ment and con­trol issues.

Rev­o­lu­tions made it easy to play a Civ game on a con­sole, and the iPhone ver­sion takes it a step fur­ther by mak­ing it easy to play with one hand. Do you notice a theme here? Games that adhere well to one handed game­play are excel­lent canidates to enjoy while I drop a deuce, deuce the dog, or de-deuce the baby. They are also great for when you’re brush­ing your teeth, fly­ing a plane, or search­ing for some­thing in your pocket. Char­ac­ter move­ments, pro­duc­tion queues, diplo­macy, and infra­struc­ture are all eas­ily man­aged with a sin­gle thumb. That’s not even a whole hand. Just think of the things you could do with those extra fingers…I won’t pop­u­late that list.

Screen­shot of the world map.

If you haven’t played a Civ game before this may be a good place to start. While It allows for more metic­u­lous micro­man­age­ment, it shines in sim­plic­ity. The Civ series can be a bit daunt­ing when you first check it out. When I bought and installed Civ 2 for the PC I spent hours and hours read­ing about the best ways to man­age my pop­u­la­tion to har­vest the most food. The game basi­cally comes with a book. I didn’t think these games could be scaled down to any­thing eas­ily man­age­able, but they pulled it off with Rev­o­lu­tions. Hell the game help is under 12 pages long… it’s 11! Modes present are Ran­dom Map, and Sce­nario. I found it fun to start with ran­dom map, and then spice up the objec­tives with a sce­nario every so often. The games can go pretty quick rel­a­tive to older releases, with each game last­ing around one to two hours, and that was often because I refused to win by any way besides annihilation.

Rev­o­lu­tions will not com­pletely sat­isfy your urge for a Civ game, but it’s sim­plic­ity is a nice rest stop in the city build­ing genre.

Screen­shot of zoomed city information.

Quan­ti­ta­tive Review:

• Game­play: 9.5 - The Depth that is expected of a Civ game is here and it’s almost as addic­tive as the full PC ver­sions. One thing I hope they fix in this fran­chise is the Diplo­macy. It always seems like the AI can bully you, and you are unable to bully them even if you own half of the world. I want to be able to type my own arro­gant taunts and get what I want. The AI hurts my feel­ings sometimes.
• Visu­als: 9.5 - Every­thing looks great. I’ve always been a fan of the char­ac­ter design in Civ games and this one is not excep­tion. Rev­o­lu­tions was devel­oped on the con­sole, and I think they knew they were going to do a mobile ver­sion dur­ing devel­op­ment, to broaden their audi­ence. With the sim­pli­fied game-play they were able to draw more casual gamers into the fran­chise. The friendly look­ing char­ac­ters are very fit­ting, even when they are declar­ing war on you.
• Sound: 9.5 - I would have given the sound a higher score if it weren’t for the strange vol­ume glitch I’ve been get­ting since I updated my iPhone to 3.1. Por­tions of the ambi­ent sounds and music are affected by the in game set­tings. The other sounds are not, and I think they fol­low the ringer vol­ume only. While writ­ing this sec­tion, I went to test this, and things have lev­eled off a bit, so I don’t know what’s going on. Oth­er­wise the sounds are great.
• Pre­sen­ta­tion: 9.0 - The menus and inter­face are eas­ily nav­i­ga­ble, with but­tons large enough you don’t have to worry about hit­ting the wrong one on a touch screen. The con­sol­i­da­tion of city info onto the iPhone screen is noth­ing short of a mir­a­cle. My only quar­rel was with the sta­bil­ity of the game. I would get the occa­sional “crash to desk­top’, which forced me to relive some of my old PC gam­ing days where I had to save every 5 minutes.

• Adap­ta­tion to iPhone: 10.0 - When I think, “Hmm… Civ game on the iPhone…”, and some­times I say it out loud, this is exactly what it should be. Maybe they could have thrown some crazy 3d city views in for when you make a won­der or some­thing, but that would have likely just slowed things down. I am quite impressed.

• Over­all: 9.5 - I often hear peo­ple say­ing any­thing over a cou­ple bucks is too much for an iPhone game. Well that’s prob­a­bly because you have pre­con­ceived notions of the crap that pop­u­lated the device in the begin­ning. Devel­op­ers are learn­ing the hard­ware, and putting some pretty impres­sive games out there. I just hope the 3GS doesn’t kill my gam­ing, because game are built only for it’s proces­sor. The $5 will be well spent, get­ting you hours of addic­tive game-play that’s unique to the device (as far as I know).

Also just a FYI, speak­ing of $5 games, Direct2Drive has some sweet deals going on.