The disclaimer in my bio is especially important with this review. There are so many Civs and so much about this game hasn't been experienced by me. So, I recently had an opportunity to play Civ V for the first time last month with a group of friends. It was always a very chill time, and while it was indeed a strategy game where everyone was trying to win, it had a decent amount of down time that could be filled with discussion and hanging out. In that regard, Civ V is a great experience.

Civ V is also a great story generator. The grand scope of the game, and the variety of things that can happen and approaches one can take can lead to a lot of stories. One of my friends discovered a tile that was surrounded by three gems and made a rush to claim it as his own, only to end up in conflict with the AI who declared war he was not prepared for. Meanwhile on another continent my neighbor was rushing through the tech tree and I decided to build up a military to fight his defenseless cities. These stories overlapped and were quite fun to watch unfold, and Civ V is really good with that.

As a strategy game, there are definitely decisions to be made, but in a sense there are almost so many options that I ended up just kind of going through the motions and grabbing whatever upgrades sounded neat. The decisions were strategic, but Civ V isn't quite as strategy oriented as you might expect from the variety of choices. If somebody is doing something to win across the map, you don't have much control over that in the early game, and even from a diplomacy perspective it can be hard to convince people to assist your own schemes. As a result, the game can kind of just wash over you and it can be incredibly entertaining, but perhaps not always the most fair strategy experience. Then again, who would want a properly fair strategy experience anyway from Civ, since it is almost more compelling as a collaborative story generator.

The major thing that drags Civ V down for me are the technical issues. Me and my friends experienced many technical issues across our game, to the point that it had to be abandoned because they didn't want to diagnose and fix some arcane issue that should have been fixed ages ago. As a result, the story of our game didn't come to a proper end and that's just a sad note to end things on. It is inexcusable that the multiplayer should be as nonfunctional as it was during our session.

Overall, Civ V is a great time with friends, assuming the game actually works.

Civ is a franchise that I have tried a bunch over the years, but never quite got into due to the barrier to entry with a lot of the mechanics involved. When I finally did with Civ 5, I found a lot of enjoyment trying to strategize the economics of my civs, plan out intricate defenses and invasions, and it was great. However, one thing I find with Civ is that after you play like one or two games, each lasting 10s of hours, you either get bored with the minutia of playing at endgame, where everything is on autopilot and a lot of that early game strategy is lost, or you bump up the difficulty and get wrecked by the overly aggressive AI right at the start. Getting over that hump is what will allow you to enjoy this game for hundreds of hours, because there is that much content and fun to be had with the different nations, victory conditions, map sizes and layouts.

I revisit Civ every now and then because the game is fun to play, I just find myself quitting not long after my enthusiasm fades from spending 2 hours clearing the map because I already won and just need to meet the victory conditions to end the game. A great starting point for 4X strategy games, and bursting with personality, you can easily lose your entire day playing it.