Civilization 6 (2 hours, Desktop PC, @home)

Alas, all of my training over the last few days boils down to this moment in playing Civilization. Going through the menus I have to select my graphics settings (weird), select my sound settings (also weird), and tell it that yes, I indeed do want to use my mouse. And I feel as if the past five times I’ve booted up this game I’ve made one critical mistake. I never thought to play as a different civilization other than Rome. So this time I decided to try playing as Japan, after all the mechanics can’t be too different.

So after watching the long introduction my game started very strong. I decided what my priorities were and established a few small cities all close to each other and then used the road building system to create fast trade routes between them all. This increased my gold and production output. With both of those raised a little bit more than they had been in the past I was able to build some walls on the cities and raise their levels as well as create a small army. Go Japan! We also ended up with the strongest military in the early rounds but I eventually fell behind.

What seems to elude me in this game is the later years when your civs are really supposed to be advancing. I am fairly decent at starting the game strong but I am very quick to fall down the rungs of success as others climb past me. I feel as if this is partially due to the fact that I understand the basics of this game, but because I don’t quick know what all of the symbols mean or what all of my options are I am limited to less flexibility in the later rounds. I simply do what I know and only learn a little bit at a time. If I continued my trend of learning one small thing each time I played eventually I would become good at it and have a very high sense of value for my abilities. However, the very idea of that somewhat disgusts me. I understand the value in learning something hard by yourself, but today’s video games cater to making sure you know what you need to do or at least explain what the things you will experience on your screen mean so that you can change your decisions based on those visual or audio cues. Civilization fails to do this. Perhaps with the manual in hand the game would be much easier, but you have to remember that most video games of the 21st century don’t come with manuals at all but rather tutorials built into the first level or two of a game before setting you off on your own. The very beginning of the easiest difficulty setting in Civ does this, but not for long and it doesn’t take long for me to become totally lost.

6/10 Would play again

Lund Out