Civilization Revolution 2 12+

Many years ago I adored the original Civilisation game on my PC. Many, many happy hours were spent battling away. Having not played for 15+ years I recently got the urge to do so again and bought Civilisation VI, again for PC. The main game has moved on in terms of complexity and challenge (and computing power: my fan starts running at max within minutes!).

It is with this intro that I recently purchased the iOS version. And I have really enjoyed it. The animations are slick, the stages logical and the variability between different games very good.

I've played three or four games and have found them increasingly challenging as I move up the difficulty levels.

However, there are certain features from the main game that I am dearly missing: killing off a unit; making your only offers to other civilisations, finding out who you are at war with, forming alliances and recommendations for the best place to build a city or which unit to build.

Will I carry in playing? Certainly! Am I hoping for more tweaks and extra layers of complexity? Absolutely.

As an introduction and advert for the main game I think that this iOS version is superb. However, as a standalone item I think it may get boring within 20 games. Both of these outcomes make the price too high. :(

I have played the original Civ Rev since I discovered it on Nintendo DS and thoroughly enjoyed it (got it on Xbox too). The rest of my family plays Civ VI (and it’s earlier incarnations) but I find those too complicated with their massive tech trees/ governments/ religions etc. This is perfect for me, and I LOVE the update... has the feel of Civ VI in the interface without the complexity. The added bonus is the bigger screen than the DS. A few more troop types have been added, plus a few new wonders, so plenty of new things to get to grips with while still knowing what’s going on. This game is a great introduction to the Civilisation games... if you find this too easy on hardest difficulty, then you really should move onto the full Civ VI! This is a step closer to the main Civ games than the original Civ Rev, maybe one day I’ll ‘graduate’ to that, but for now, this gives me hours of fun!

Like Sid Meier's Starships, I was disappointed that so many big trade-offs have been made in complexity in order to scale down the concept to an iOS interface that much of the immersiveness has been lost. It's tricky to find any functions above basic point-and-click tasks, and more advanced actions (e.g. sending units to sleep rather than fortify; seeing who you're at war or peace with; creating build queues; seeing an overview of your units or cities without having to cycle through each one) have all been lost. This and a lack of intelligent prompting also means it's easy to leave your units/cities idle for multiple turns. Still a great game in its own right, but fans of the franchise may be disappointed if they were expecting a more comparable port from the original platform.