It's not a great game, but it is a good, decent game. if you want to grind and do some dumb stuff it's pretty much it. I've a feeling it's going to be a better platform for mods and other things than something people will enjoy doing stuff around in just because.

Don't expect much from it and you'll land exactly where you want. It's not a great feeling game though in terms of controls. They made this for controller and the port to PC feels super rushed. They kept the Tab/ctrl/alt as replacements for shoulder buttons. They used F2 as the main switchout button. There's a lot of odd decisions and this really needs to cook a bit longer but I'm at like 60/40 in recommending it.

No.

Get it. Try it. It's worth the play through.

Bought it because I figured, ♥♥♥♥ it, some of the creation shop stuff may have been interesting enough. I didn't really care either way. 30$CAD for a few modder stuff and I figured that Bethesda would have added additional support considering they were curating this list.

How the hell did they ♥♥♥♥ this up this much? Seriously. How.

The load times, multitude of other issues. I mean... bethesda is known for dropping the ball, but this is dropping the soap levels of screwed. They really don't give a ♥♥♥♥ and you can tell. Refunded because the content infinitely loads and makes the rest of the game unplayable.

Bought the game in december, refunded it.
Purchased again in April and dropped 320$. They banned me months later because apparently they gave me too much points on their cosmetic shop. No way to rectify the situation beyond (according to them) making a throwaway steam account. Slow response from their support. They won't even tell you what you did wrong. You have to piece it together yourself.

If you want to buy the game to try it in the meantime don't bother. Just wait until it's out because they may just arbitrarily ban you for something you have no control over, and claim you refunding them was a chargeback.

Oh boy.

So a bit of a precursor here. Biogenesis content is actually pretty good - however, it comes packaged into the free patch 4.0
The 4.0 patch is... atrocious. I beta-tested. I wrote at length of all the issues there. Half were fixed. The pushed it out (read Eladrin's post where he basically says they knew it was a sh*t show but did it anyways because they'd have more time for bug fixes?)

Punish them as you will. Don't buy this until the 4.0 bugs are fixed. Don't buy this because if you want to play on a better release, and roll back to 3.9x this DLC won't work anyways. So just sit back and relax.

This game is probably the greatest CRPG outside of Baldur's Gate 3 you'll ever experience.


Buy it, the DLCs, and every other game Owlcat produces just in support of this game. I cannot give a more glowing review. Seriously.

Some of the fundamental changes of this game are absolutely horrible. EDIT: After 2 hours I'm done.

**DO NOT BUY** - This is hot garbage made over a dumpster fire. I could disagree with design decisions but this is absolutely intolerable with a widescreen configuration. Even if that's fixed, the developers really took the p*** out of the audience this time.

1) Some of the nations not being presented in game are absolutely ridiculous (Britain is gone?) - Yet some leaders are represented twice.

2) The game feels poorly made. There's a lot of polish but it lacks depth. The tiles that flip annoyingly as you explore. I've had to mute the game because the music sounds AI generated. Its strums and drums and flutes annoy me for some reason. There's something about it, that I cannot put my finger on... That's fine, it can be muted off, but it's another negative point for me.

3) Leaders need to be played through to unlock these momento-things. I get trying to have some continual progress but I've never been one to really want to play nations just to play nation. If you're going to make things arbitrary, why do you require me to play different leader for bonuses? Why isn't this task based, or on crafted scenarios? *where are the scenarios*?

4) I don't mind the popups for events. Rome has felt flavourful, a step in the right direction for that part, but holy hell does the game lack any real feeling of progress or goals. This game will feel like the same game after 2 games.

5) Needless changes, such as difficulties being gone (Prince, King, etc) - Map sizes have been crushed. So Standard is now normal. I can't customize anything. No raging barbarians. Nothing particularly useful. It feels like there's been a bunch of content cut to be sold back to me later. This isn't just a matter of lack of options to, it's a lack of understanding who their customer base is. This is straight up a cashgrab

6) There's really weird UI control. I play on a 2560x1440 and this games text is either too small, or if I bump up the UI it's now cartoonishly big. Unit Health bar when attacking is like 1 millimetre. It's a joke.

7) I've criticized the graphics a lot in the last game's reviews. They've largely done a fantastic job this time. Still, that hex tile map is awful. Gold VII that appear everywhere as if to remind you that you're playing civilization VII and didn't accidentally start a better game.

8) The options for EVERYTHING - Such as map types are absolute garbage. I hate the way you actually scroll through options, and there's really no real good explanation to what they're suppose to generate like. Hovering over them says: "Select the Map Type" - Real awesome tooltip there guys. Real informative. Maybe look back to civ 6 and have a small image demonstrating a rough idea of the map generation methodology. Tooltips are poor. Trying to find things on the map is a joke.

9) Required to sign into another service to play the game. Why does every company feel the need to direct traffic to them. No i'm not interested in this. I'm hardly interested in steam, but it's the best platform we have. You put a civilization behind logging in so we could get our data stolen or sold. F the customers, am I right? 160 wasn't nearly enough for our upper management.

10) some of the leader choices weren't even... leaders... In any sense. Like, I like Big Benny, and Niccolo, but neither of these were national leaders. Same with Tubman, Confucius, etc, etc.. If you're going to throw random people out there, why not just... let you create a random person and customize everything instead of trying to pretend this is a historically inspired game anymore. Himiko is an odd choice considering there's a bit of debate over her authenticity in Japan, thus once again weird to include semi-mythical figures. (She's mentioned in the "based on true events" romance of the three kingdoms novels.) I don't mind if we want to really lean into the fantastical though, but if we're going to, can you guys just nut up and actually do it.

11) 3 ages is odd as well. Like, I get you want each age to feel more unique and fleshed out, but maybe actually focus on them in a meaningful way. More tech in the eras. More indepth events. Make the ages seem more fleshed out. Instead the whole game feels worse **then a single scenario on Civ 6**

12) No earth map. Big malus here. I'm sure players will make one (TSL/YnAMP bros.)

13) The game is incomplete, and I don't mean that in a "they just stripped out stuff" - i mean that in a "We can't fit this on a switch, so keep removing stuff until it runs." sort of way. This game wasn't tested at all in QA from the amount of glaring errors. Graphic glitches cause arrows to flicker out and the amount of design decisions by people who were more concerned over making the game approachable, or concerned with something entirely else I'm not sure. This game isn't worth the money you'll spend on it.

14) The tutorials. Default to asking if we want them please. Really dislike games that go: "HAY. HAY LOOK. CLICK HERE. LOOK HERE. NO YOU GOT TO DO IT THIS WAY." - Get the hell out of the way. I'm not interested in hand holding. I'm sure some are, provide that option instead of defaulting into it. Jeez.

15) I know the last civ did this, so I can't fault you guys for being unoriginal, but just naming stuff after real world places when they have nothing to do with real world places (such as calling a random river "The Tiber River" it really kind of jerks you out of the experience. If you need help maybe chatgpt could help you. Just come up with random names for stuff from originating civs or something like that.

16) This is less tangible and not really something one can control but it's simply not "fun" as far as I've played into it. We'll see as I play through a full game, and will update this review as I complete it. EDIT: I've played as much as I care to play. I can't get 2 hours through this game. This is it, Faraxis. The last game I'll ever purchase from 2K games. Seriously you guys needed to hire someone outside of your office to play the game for 10 minutes to get an opinion from a customer..

17) Armies are weird and largely just transport ships for land units.

18) Switching nations on an age up, because that's how nations evolve. Jeez. If you're going to be stealing mechanics, at least steal them from paradox. CK3 could have taught you guys something about how to handle culture.

Alright. 2 Hours in. I've tried. This one isn't worth 160$CAD, It's not worth 60$CAD, and I wouldn't pay 20$ for it in the future. If I didn't buy it from a 3rd party site I would refund this hot mess in a heartbeat. This is so bad that I'm I'm going to change my Civ 6 review just to reflect how much better that game is to this mess, because seriously? Don't buy this. It's not worth it. You think I'm joking or something, I'm not. This isn't me review bombing. This isn't me railing against chaaaange. There's a bunch of ideas that if they were executed properly would have been great. This was executed by a bunch of middle manager "idea guys" whose concepts for game design left a laundry list of other games to programmers who were probably fresh out of college and on their 40th week of "Crunch time" trying to parse the terrible ideas leadership had with how to actually code it. This won't be fixed. This won't be better with time.

Whoever is in charge legitimately seems to have said: "We're going to steal as many ideas as possible and halfarse every one of them" and ran with it. I don't want to be mean to the developers. I'm sure some of the programmers there did their best. You guys are champs. But when you play the game, do you seriously have fun? You went through this and were like: "Yeah, this is the game I want attached to my name for the rest of time."? - I'd politely ask to get my name removed from the credits if I were you. This is a stain on a CV.

If you liked gladius this game is right up your alley. More story elements which are welcomed. It has it's flaws but it's a solid buy from me. Just wish there were more faction choices to pick from.

I'll post what I posted to the tech support portion:

This installs without permission or a prompt a bunch of Windows applications that one may not want on their PC. Game Bar, Xbox, the store, etc. These are all required for the multiplayer experience, but if you delete them (power shell) these intrusive malware-esque things away, you won't be able to run the game. This may not matter to 99% of you, that's fine. It matters to me and those who want windows to act like a ****ing operating system.