Civilization Revolution was developed by Firaxis Games, and designed by series creator Sid Meier.  It was published by 2KGames and was released on July 8th for the Playstation 3 and XBox 360.  As always, this review will focus on the 360 version, though both versions are essentially the same.

Story:  As the leader of one of sixteen countries, it’s up to you to guide your people to worldwide domination.  Starting with nearly nothing, you must utilize research, science, diplomacy, gold, and war to further your civilization along.  You can win the game by amassing a certain amount of gold, building a certain amount of Great Wonders and settling Great People, being the first to reach Beta Centauri by spaceship, or by conquering your competing civilizations through warfare.

Graphics:  The playing field, randomized for each game, is bright and cartoony.  The various characters that you interact with — other civilization leaders and your advisors — are animated quite well, are very expressive in their movements, and each have their own unique animations.  The menus are easy to navigate and simple, though sometimes are blocked by advisors for a few seconds.  Overall, it’s a nice looking game, but it’s nothing that will push your console to the limits.

Gameplay:  Strategy games have been attempted on consoles before with mixed results.  Given the often meticulous planning and details that strategy games require, you need a mouse and keyboard to really feel on top of things.  But CivRev was developed specifically for consoles, and menu browsing with a controller is easy for this game.

The biggest addition to CivRev is your four advisors, one for War, Culture, Science, and Foreign Affairs.  These four characters will be popping on on your screen all the time to update you on what’s happening in the world.  It’s a novel idea, at first, and kind of cute.  But after a couple of games, you will grow to hate them, as they only slow the game down.  Unfortunately, there is no option to turn them off.

As far as buiding cities and expanding your empire, controls are a breeze.  You can select what buildings or military units to construct, and you’re told how many turns it will take to complete them.  If you have enough gold (gained through building banks and mines), you can rush contstruction — very handy if you absolutely need a city wall or a tank on the next turn.  As your cities grow, you can use more resources and construct things faster.  During the game, you also have to choose various technologies to research, which yields newer buildings, Wonders, and military units.  By bringing up a menu, you can look at a tech tree, which illustrates what technologies you must research in order to learn other technologies.  For example, if you want to quickly build tanks, the tech tree will tell you which technologies to research in order to do so.

You can also play scenario games as well, such as starting off with all techs learned or where waging war is a priority.

Sound:  The music is pleasant, but is mostly there to fill a void — you’ll probably not be humming it at work.  Most of what you’ll be hearing is the chatter from your advisors and other world leaders.  Actually, to call it chatter is generous — the characters speak in gibberish that is similar to what you’d find in The Sims, but not nearly as entertaining.  Your advisors are the worst, since they’re constantly nagging and butting in.  Thankfully, you have the option to mute everybody’s speech.  In fact, this is a great game to turn the sound off completely and listen to a custom playlist from either a plugged-in MP3 device or a networked computer.

Multiplayer:  CivRev offers online competitive play four up to four players, featuring free-for-all, one-on-one, or two-against-two team play.  There is an option to put a timer on each players’ turn to help speed online games up.

Achievements:  Most of these are fairly simple and straighforward, such as build your first city, your first army, etc,.  Others include winning specific victories on the hardest difficulty level.  You also get achievements for winning a game with each civilization — considering that one game can take a few hours to win, getting the full 1000 points of gamerscore will take more time and patience than skill.  In my own personal experience, the achievement that eluded me the longest was “Here’s Looking at You, Kid” — unlock every famous person.  Since they spawn at random, it’s mostly a matter of luck that the one last guy you need to show up (Homer, in my case) will finally appear.  For the full list of achievements, check out XBox360Achievements.org.

Intangibles:  It’s a good thing I’m not in marketing, as I would have called this game “Civilization for Beginners”.  As a fan of the PC series, I found CivRev to be a very streamlined experience, and even on the higher difficulty levels, a cinch to win.  However, I’m not bitter — it’s clear that CivRev is intended to be an introductory game for the console crowd that normally wouldn’t play a strategy game.

- India’s leader is Mahatma Ghandi.  While playing as Ghandi, you can command armies, destroy cities, and even eventually release a nuke-u-lar (as Sarah Palin says, you betcha) on another city.  As Ghandi.  WTF, Sid Meier?  I know that Ghandi was an Indian Congressional leader, but given the war-like nature of this game, another Indian leader should have been chosen.  Prime Minister Nehru, perhaps?

The Bottom Line:  Civilization Revolution is a fine little game to introduce console gamers or maybe even younger players to the strategy genre.  Even those who are pros at the PC may find something to like here.  Despite this game being just fine for what it is, I can’t help but feel that there’s a lot of unneccessary window dressing.  Mainly, the advisors are not needed, and many character animations are there for show only.  The whole package, in fact, reminds me of an XBox Live Arcade Game.  Without a lot of the superfluous elements in CivRev, the game probably would have found great success as an Arcade title as well — in addition to being fifty dollars cheaper.

However, there’s plenty of replayability offered, and if found on sale or used, wouldn’t be a bad purchase at all.  Hardcore Civ players may want to skip it, but then again, hardcore Civ players probably don’t have XBoxes in the first place.

If you’d like to try it out, a demo is available on XBox Live Marketplace.

Final Score:  6/10, for being a good introduction to Civilization, but could have easily been an Arcade title by cutting out many unneccessary bits while retaining the core gameplay.

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