Civilization IV

Ready that dictionary of superlatives...

More Images

How do you update one of the most loved games of all time, a game that has legions of dedicated fans which must also take into consideration the shifting expectations of today's gamers? How can you cook up a new recipe for a heavily codified game while retaining its essential juices and flavour? What kind of fear must a developer experience as they plunge their hands deep into the very heart and soul of Civilisation, performing elective surgery that could just as easily kill the series as it could extend its happy lifespan? These questions no doubt went through the minds of Firaxis employees as they developed the fourth game in the Civilisation series. Whichever answers they came up with they were clearly the right ones.

Civilisation takes the player from 4000BC to the near future, through the ages of history on a strategic ride of truly epic proportions. Starting with a small tribe of people protected by little more than a stick with a sharp stone tied to the end the player must colonise the world, overcoming the perils of existence though the liberal construction of edifying buildings, the advancement of their scientific, religious and cultural abilities and the kinds of negotiations that take place over both the meeting table and the battlefield. Essentially a turn based strategy game Civilisation is a Pandora's Box of gameplay as new players quickly realise that there's more depth to this game than a car crash involving Jean Paul Sartre and Plato into the Library of Congress. Fortunately this new version has been modified to appeal to rookies while both retaining the parts that veterans love so much while also improving on nearly all of them as well.

Players start off with one city, which they must grow and use to create settlers who will be the vanguard of their expansion. Find a suitable spot and a settler can found a new city. The more cities you have the quicker you can research the improved technologies which you will need to develop your society. Expand too quickly, however, and your finances will be depleted by the strain of managing a large empire before you have discovered how to generate real wealth. Each map is dotted with resources which can improve a cities health and wellbeing or provide a little extra coin. Join your cities up by roads (once you discover the wheel), and all your people can enjoy the fruits of your efforts. You must improve the area around each city so as to encourage sustainable growth while making sure you have enough of an army to protect yourself from the attentions of the competing civilisations. Manage to balance all of these needs while keeping a firm eye on the future and you will hopefully be in the running to come out on top of the world.

Special mention must be made about the first thing you encounter in Civilisation IV, its wonderful music. Right from the moment the menu screen loads up the player is treated to an array of evocative and wonderfully arranged melodies. Civ IV is not just a wonderful game it has also been well attended to when it comes to options. If the supplied music is not to your taste then your personal music collection is a mere mouse click away. There's built-in voice comms which even allows you to speak to individuals as well as all players, perfect for sneaky strategising. Another neat feature is the built in alarm clock, handy for those who can't tear themselves away but really musty get to bed before the birds wake up. Mod support is fully integrated from the start so once the prolific Civ community starts to pump out new features for the game getting them running should thankfully be a painless affair.

There's lots of choice in Civ IV and with the full custom game options and mods taken into consideration Civ IV could be viewed as a gameplay framework around which all kinds of entertainment can be found. Previous Civ games let you mess around with the world settings for each new game. Civ IV takes this even further with a large number of specialised maps to offer all sorts of new challenges. Amongst others there's a land only map and a corresponding world dominated by a single large lake along with a frozen ice cap world. There are even more map types that cater for adventurous multiplayer games while the balanced map ensures there's no arguments about one player having an unfair starting advantage over the others. Map sizes also range from tiny duelling maps to a gigantic representation of the planet Earth, so both the hurried and the glacially patient will be able to enjoy a game of Civilization to their taste.

Feedback had always been a problem in preceding Civs with players often left to guess why their society had taken a sudden nosedive or why it unexpectedly found itself enjoying a period of prosperity. Holding the mouse pointer over most icons will open up extended tooltips which quickly provide the player with all the relevant information. On the finances screen you can get a full rundown of where all your money is going while your citizens will now tell you exactly what is pissing them off and causing them to get all Parisian. A range of overlay options aid in quickly finding where a new source of coal has appeared or which tiles are the most bounteous, while hovering the mouse over a city's name will quickly display its particular needs and construction rates. As you can easily set up build queues from the main screen players don't need to dive into the city screen all the time, a subtle change which takes a while to get used to yet once adopted helps to speed up the game that little bit more.

Firaxis have done an exemplary job of streamlining much of the gameplay without ever diluting that epic Civ feeling. Games take on average considerably less time to complete than they did before and this is without fully using all the automation options that are available. Personally, I can never fully trust workers to automatically upgrade my cities nor do I like delegating a cities growth to an AI governor. I often felt compelled to do so in Civ III if I wanted to finish a game before Kajagoogoo came back in fashion but these days the amount of workers and cities that I have to manage is more, well, manageable.

The need to spam roads and train tracks across your empire has been removed as the way commerce is handled has been slightly tweaked. Not only does this make things less time consuming but it stops your later societies looking like a new pattern for Burberry. The graphics are indeed a major improvement over anything that has come before. Stylistically they are akin to the recent Pirates remake, favouring the same bold colour schemes and cutesiefied visages for the various leaders. There's plenty of incidental animations going on and zooming in close to a tile reveals mines pumping away, bananas falling into baskets at plantations and bustling cities complete will all improvements standing proud. While you can't rotate the viewpoint you can zoom so far out that the globe becomes apparent against its background of stars. While playing at either of these two extremes is not advisable you can choose to play from a top-down, Civ 2 style perspective or from the more personal angle of Civ III. Common with the rest of the game the developers have laid out all reasonable options and leave it up to the player to enjoy themselves as they see fit. The improved visuals are not going to have the graphics whores jumping ship from their FPSes but they certainly make staring at your monitor screen for huge stretches of time all the more bearable and are yet another of the many welcome improvements which so define the Civilisation IV experience.