Civilization IV is one heck of an act to follow. Designer Soren Johnson already looked at the work that Sid Meier, Brian Reynolds, and Jeff Briggs did for previous titles, and he pushed, pulled, added, removed, reshaped, and refined Civ until it became not just a new installment in the franchise, but in many ways, the definitive Civ. Sure, you can easily say that each Civilization title is fantastic and addictive, but Civ IV essentially became the peak of the series. You can almost feel that development studio Firaxis had a sort of “Wow, it’s going to be hard to improve on Johnson’s work, so let’s make the next Civ game something different” type of feeling, and so followed up Civ IV (and its expansions) with Civilization Revolution, which took the series into a more casual boardgame-style direction.
So it’s interesting to see what lead designer Jon Shafer and the rest of Firaxis do for Civilization V. They come out and change some of the fundamentals of Civ. Hexes instead of squares! Military units that don’t stack! City-states that serve as a weird little-cousins to the traditional civilizations! You read and hear about these changes, and you ask yourself, “What are they doing to the series? Do these weird, and wide-scope changes work? Can you even consider this Civ anymore?” I recently had the chance to play Civ V uninterrupted for a couple of hours, and the short verdict is: it’s still Civ, it’s working so far, and it’s already pretty damn good (enough to, as the headline indicates, be the turn-based alternative to StarCraft II).
