End of the Year Catch up #1 Sid Meier's Civilization VI

Sid Meier's Civilization VI starts off the end of the year catch up where I finally "Complete" Games that I have been playing throughout the year and clearing out my backlog for the site.

Having played this since the beginning of the year and accumulating hundreds of hours into the game I can say I am glad this game was recommended to me by a friend. Having acquired it through a Humble Bundle, there was really no incentive for me to play it as it seemed out of my realm and being afraid of the mechanics the game was going to throw at me. I was certainly aware of the IP and its history but it never really captivated me till this year. I will always give games recommended to me a fair shake. It really helps me bond not only with friends but it also gives some great discussions into the game from a different point of view.

Playing the game, I must say the world of turn-based strategy is quite a experience. As someone who hadn't played any Civilization games before VI, I was pleasantly surprised by the depth and complexity that this game offered. Having played mostly solo during my time, I still feel like I am learning something new every time I play matches and change leader which by the way there is LOAD of them, no two leaders really feel the same (Maybe?) lol. It felt like mindless fun and I always wanted to do "One more turn" as the time struck 3am on certain days lol very addicting I must also add. I certainly get lost in the complexity of it all. There is so much information on the wiki that sometimes I forget I am playing a match. If I were to give a criticism I would say, maybe the A.I at times is not fair on the higher difficulties. Maybe I just need to "git gud" but even playing optimally, I feel like one wrong move and its over for me. Throughout time I feel like this will get better as I get more hours into the game. I am not sure how others feel about it.

Overall, I quite enjoyed Civ VI. SUPER glad I was recommended it and it has been a blast playing it all year long. I cannot speak on the other Civ games but this one seemed super solid in my eyes. A rough start at first as It's hard to understand but fun once you really get into it. Soon you will say "One more turn"

[Review of the Nintendo Switch version]

It does its job, letting you play Civ VI on the go, but it really struggles to do that job at times. As expected the graphics and framerate take a big hit, but what take perhaps the biggest hit are the load times, which can be pretty atrocious. CPU players’ turns can take upwards of 3 minutes to complete. The worst part is just how much of a battery hog this game is in handheld mode, with just an hour of continuous playtime eating nearly 30% of my battery. The Switch also runs really hot running this game, with the fans working double time just to keep the Switch’s processor from exploding.

I commend Aspyr for managing to squeeze Civ VI onto the Switch, but all of its flaws make this port one you’re better off either skipping or sticking to playing it docked.

I've played a lot of Civilization in my life. Like, A LOT a lot. So much that I didn't play much of Civ 6 when it came out due to sheer Civilization exhaustion. But then it came. The hankering. The need to passively observe Gandhi eviscerating country after country in his quest for dominance as I watch on the sidelines and offer him endless sheep and uranium for prolonged peace. After finally playing a campaign of Civ 6, I'm happy to report that it is, indeed, another Civ game.

That means you know exactly what you're getting and what you're getting is the video game equivalent of pizza, pulled pork, chicken wings, spare ribs and BBQ brisket coming together to make an ultimate food baby. In short, it slaps. There's very few changes outside of storms that make you waste 7 turns fixing your 80 turtle farms, the addition of a districts mechanic and giant Pacific Rim death robots that Scotland will randomly set on you for unjustly nuking Birmingham (it's a shithole guys, I'm doing us a favour).

But listen. Sean Bean does the voice-over now. SEAN BEAN. And if that isn't a game-changing innovation, then I don't know what is.

After enjoying everything about Civilization Revolution on PS3, I decided to try the main series for the first time. Since I bought it in 2020, I have never finished a single match in this game.

The presentation and graphics are great, even the menu design and soundtrack. Overall, it is a very well-crafted game. However, playing on the PS4 is quite annoying. There are too many menus that are difficult to access using the buttons, and the text is too small. It seems like they just copied and pasted the PC version without considering the difference in resolution or adaptability.

I was expecting the matches to be long, but they are too long, and it is easy to lose your units over the map. I have tried to play three times, but each time I kept looking at the clock to keep an eye on my other chores during the day.

It looks like an amazing game, but I will never have time to play it, and if I did have time, I would choose to do more productive hobbies. Unfortunately, I will never play this game again.

I played the hell out of Civ III back in the day but then didn't play IV or V (except for brief experiences with console ports, which were basically unbearable to play; this series really needs a mouse) so I'm not comparing this to the prior couple of entries.

I also have basically no experience with the 4X genre, which always intrigues me but is often intimidating to traverse the learning curve and/or too complicated for me to wrap my head around. Civ VI is complicated and intricate but is also intuitive enough to figure out as you move along, and it helps that it starts off so small and gradually expands, unlike some other games in the genre that thrust you into control of a whole kingdom or galaxy with dozens of different meters and resources and whatnot to manage right off the bat. Basically, Civ VI is more approachable and also made me eager to try other 4X games.

Marking as complete after getting my first victory, though I'm not done digging into the game by any stretch. (I don't think I ever finished a campaign in Civ III (I was like 10, gimme a break.))

Civilization V is in my top V(get what I did there?) games of all time, and that set a super high standard for VI. After years of going through phases with the game, and recently picking up the platinum edition on my new steam account(old one got hacked) after a long time of not playing, I decided I'd start playing it again and man was I not disappointed.

First let me touch on DLC. I went an awful long time without playing this game with the DLC and that was a mistake. While all the leader packs are optional and are there if you want them, the two main things you need are the expansions. Both rise and fall and gathering storm are great expansions adding tons of new content that completely transforms how I play the game. It's not quite the drastic difference CIV 5 vanilla had vs with expansions, but it's still a big difference.


Civilization VI in my opinion does almost everything a sequel needs to do: take a game and make every aspect of it better. Of course there are areas where this hasn't happened like the difficulty, which feels reduced from V, but all in all do not let snobs tell you otherwise: this is an improvement. V was much more bold though, seeping away in new directions and experimenting with the tried and true formula, however that is not a criticism, as VI improved on that formula.


I'm not going to give a full breakdown of the game mechanics, because this would be college essay level long, but overall all components feel great. Combat feels great, especially when you're more advanced than another civ and wipe them out with units from an era later, and feels very "grand". On higher difficulty levels you can't simply throw whatever units you have on a city and have it annexed, you need to think ahead.


My main issues though, as usual for Civ games, the AI. The AI, even after all this time and all these updates, still feels broken. Their trade offers are ridiculous, they'll get mad at you for stuff they did to you, they'll declare wars for not having enough naval units, they are bad. I don't remember one singular time where the AI impressed me in a tactic they had, and that really disappoints me. This of course raises the question of Civ 7, which is already confirmed, and how the AI will function in that game. I really, really hope they improve what they did here because the AI brings it down so much. I also don't like the barebones diplomacy. Civ 5 felt much richer in that sense. While Rise and fall did help that a little bit with the world congress(which feels like the bonus round in mario party half the time), there isn't really anything you can do aside from the basics like trade and declare war with other countries. I wish you could form a secret alliance, joint wars have actual plans etc.


In terms of other stuff, the graphics are great IMO, even as a huge fan of 5. It just feels so lively and cool with all the different details you can see when zooming in close. The sound is alright, the sound effects are cool and the music is too but the sound mixing is awful. Whenever I enter a leader screen and they'll have their unique music, it'll keep playing while I'm in the game for a solid minute before slowly fading away. This is clearly intentional which makes me think: why?


All in all, even if I don't want to say this, you should play this over V right now. There's so many unique systems and features and ways you can go about building your civilization, its astounding, and if VII is half as good as this, we are in for a treat.

Without mods it's a 8/10 but with mods it's a 10/10. The game is fantastic in most aspects but fails with UI and AI.

Policy cards are oddly vague about what their effects will be, but a simple mod like Extended Policy Cards fixes this. Likewise, choosing a trade route is a chore with the amount of options and limited sorting possibilities, so another simple mod like Better Trade Screen fixes this too.

As Civilization games get more complex it can be more fun for the player, but as a consequence the AI gets worse and worse at the game. The game tries to make up for the dumb AI by just giving them huge stat bonuses at the start of a run on higher difficulties. This just creates an inverse difficulty curve though. The first 50 turns are brutal as the AI starts with multiple cities and soldiers to easily kill you, but if you get past 50 turns then their poor decision making means you'll easily win after this. Another couple mods like Real Strategy AI and Late Game AI help with this to make the difficulty more consistent throughout the run rather than all at the start.

If you don't have access to a PC to play this game with mods then I would only recommend this game if you haven't played anything in this genre before. If you are familiar with 4X or Grand Strategy games before then you'll likely find this tedious because of the bad UI and boring because the AI won't challenge you. If you can use mods though then I recommend this to everyone. Of course there's tons of other mod options if you want to add more to the game, but just these four simple mods make a huge difference to me.

Few games in this genre have a perfect style

But Civ 6 is honestly the pinnacle it's creative fun and unique.

Heaps of different leaders with different perks and units, natural disasters that effect terrain and bonuses. And you have to think things through there's hardly any switching of victory styles midway through or anything you need to work out what you're doing and why early on it's a long game but nonetheless it's fun as hell.

Also props to them for changing the music for each leader you pick super creative.