I've been following it, obviously, for quite a while now, and like all the other versions before it, I've had very high hopes for it. But I kept reading review after review, and seeing video upon video of the game in early release right up until today and I got to say, it made me a bit nervous.
The reviews are decidedly mixed. I'm not going to go deep into them, and I'm not even going to devote much of this blog post in really giving my opinion after about five hours today playing the game, as to my own personal review, other than just a quick summary.
One of the big gripes a lot of reviewers had during the pre-release phase of gameplay was the fact that they said they felt the game seemed incomplete and unpolished. The UI was especially criticized. And a lot of veterans, players that I guess I would position myself similarity to, really felt flummoxed by the leader and culture interchangeability as well as the reroll of your civilization's basic nationhood during a changeover into a new age. It's a mechanic that's similar to another game called Humankind which I also own and I also have mixed feelings about. In fact, after five hours of playing this game, similarities to that game are without a doubt overwhelming.
This game was not cheap either. I bought the base game and the only extras I got were a couple of additional leaders to choose from due to the fact that I bought it a few days before today as a pre-release purchase. $69.99. Now this isn't the most I've paid for a game. That record goes to this game's predecessor: Civilization 6. But, that was a deluxe version with a full season pass that came with all the DLC that was available during pre-release so I paid $80 at that time back in 2016.
Of course like all games nowadays these price tags are not the end of it. DLCs come out as the game goes on and continues to get developed. Or should I say, as a game like this which has a lot of quirks and bugs gets fixed in updates that they outright don't even mask the fact that they are fixes by rightly calling them patches.
I remember back in the old days when a game developer released a patch it was almost as an apology but now it's to be expected. The thought is, I guess, of course you don't buy a complete game on release day, it will require the patches to bring it to a more complete version. Kind of like if you went to a car dealership and you bought a car without tires, windshield wipers, headlights, or air conditioning. Sure, we'll throw those in as you go along.
The biggest thing for me is after five hours of playing this game almost everything about it feels devoid of soul. It's hard to describe.
The artwork is fuzzy. The UI, as everyone says, is clunky. Like it's predecessor, many of the pop-ups and decision trees that you're faced with seem totally arbitrary and worthless. Many of the music selections and background audio clips of ambient sounds are outright copies from previous installations of civilization. This was never done before. I consider this one of the worst transgressions, total laziness. I could go on and on but I just don't feel energized enough to do so. Playing this game has left me feeling hollow and empty.
I didn't even get into the horrible AI, the, of course, terrible diplomacy, the glitchy graphic bugs that still exist even after yesterday's newest patch, the fact that the game crashed on me twice already, the trade route system which frankly makes no sense to me, the fake tactical battle simulations which still just depend on the same old RISK style "whoever rolls the highest role on a dice toss wins" mentality just as it's always been.
Of course only playing five hours today I didn't get to anything like a modern age so I couldn't tell you if Gandhi would pull his notoriously famous nuke option on this game. But if he did do so, it wouldn't be from the point of view of being one of the characters in the game since this is the first Civilization that he's not in it. He's probably slated to appear in some $6.99 DLC down the road. Too bad for him I'll probably already have uninstalled this mess off of my hard drive long before he shows up on the scene waving his ICBMs around.
EDIT: Nine days later and 30 more game hours. Hmm. It's growin' on me. It's kinda jellin' now. Better than 5? It has a lot of improvements over 5 and some of the good parts from 6 blended together. I'm kinda feelin' it, gotta say. Took me a while. But like all its predecessors, its first iteration's rough around the edges and will need a few more patches (and DLCs) to make it a more chef's kiss version. So final analysis...give me a few months, and I'll get back to you.