Civilization 7 Review: A New Leap in the World of Strategy Games 🎮

Introduction: The Long Wait is Worth It 🕰️

Finally, I played Civilization 7, one of the few games I’ve been eagerly anticipating since its announcement last year. As a fan of the series, I’ve spent countless hours on the fifth installment, while the sixth was a lighter experience. So, I was very excited to see the changes the seventh installment brings, which we’ll discuss in detail in this review. We’ll also try to explain many aspects of the game in a simplified manner for those trying the series for the first time.

Gameplay: Between Single and Multiplayer 🎲

The game, like any strategy game, doesn’t have a story mode. Instead, there are two main modes: single-player against AI and multiplayer online. I spent most of my time in single-player mode, where the game starts by choosing the leader you want to play as. Each leader has unique traits and abilities that give them an advantage in certain aspects of the game.

Ages: From Ancient to Modern 🏛️

The game starts in the Antiquity Age, followed by the Exploration Age, and finally the Modern Age. The new feature in this installment, which I didn’t particularly like, is that when you transition from one age to another, you retain your cities but lose certain things like buildings you’ve been constructing throughout the age. Only the Ageless buildings remain with you from one age to another. You also lose most of your soldiers, whose appearance automatically changes when you transition to the new age. Each age has unique characteristics that make the gameplay different from the previous or next age. I’m not just talking about new buildings and changing soldiers and weapons, but things specific to each age that you won’t find in others. For example, in the Antiquity Age, you focus on expanding your civilization’s influence and borders, and start exploring new places to build new cities by creating settlers. You can also create scouts, whose role is crucial in the early game as they help you identify and locate rival civilizations to establish relations with them.

Religion and Exploration: New Tools for Dominance 🌍

In the Exploration Age, you start discovering the state religion, which you can choose from several available religions. You can also create monks or missionaries in any of your cities and send them to other cities to convert them to your chosen religion. This allows you to dominate other civilizations without resorting to war. In the same age, you gain the ability to explore the ocean, as you can now sail and create ships and ports. The ocean becomes a significant part of the map, which remains inaccessible in the Antiquity Age since no one has yet discovered ships or ocean crossing.

Modern Age: Technology and Politics 🚀

In the Modern Age, you can create explorers, who are tasked with searching for and excavating ancient artifacts that start appearing in this age and spread across the map. You also begin to determine your civilization’s ideology by choosing between democracy, fascism, or communism. Each system has its own progression tree, and you can only choose one to carry through to the end of the game. Another important feature in this age is the railroads, a network of roads you can build in every city, allowing your soldiers to move from one city to another instantly without waiting for a certain number of turns. If you’re new to the series and haven’t played Civilization before, let me briefly explain the gameplay to make it easier to understand.

Game Basics: Money, Influence, Happiness, Culture, Science, and Production 💰

The gameplay in the Civilization series is based on turns. Each turn allows you to execute several commands requested by the game or anything you want to do, whether it’s building a structure, waging war, or forming an alliance with an opponent. You can execute multiple commands in the same turn, but it’s not necessary to complete them in the same turn. For example, if you want to build a new structure like the Pyramids, you might need around 20 turns to complete it. If you want to reduce the number of turns needed for construction, let me explain some basics of the gameplay.

The gameplay in Civ 7 relies on six basics, five of which are visible on the screen at the top left, as shown in the images. These are:

1- Money: You can use it to buy soldiers and build structures instantly in the same turn without waiting for their completion time if you were to build them normally without money (both options are only available if you have a city; if you have a town, you can only buy buildings and soldiers with money). Money also allows you to upgrade a small town to a large city, which costs around 1000 in-game currency.

2- Influence: You can use it to practice diplomacy and politics with your AI opponents. With a certain amount, you can choose various options to deal with your opponents, such as opening a trade route or forming an alliance for a specific purpose, like opening markets between the two civilizations, which increases the amount of money you earn as long as the alliance lasts (it lasts for 10 turns and must be renewed). You can also spy on your opponents and steal their inventions, taking them ready-made instead of starting research and development. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t punish you enough when this happens, only deteriorating the relationship between the two civilizations for a certain number of turns before it automatically improves again as if nothing happened!

3- Happiness: This is the happiness of your citizens. You benefit from it as every building you construct usually consumes a certain amount of citizen happiness, and sometimes it consumes both happiness and money. Therefore, you need to constantly increase your citizens’ happiness to progress further in the game. If happiness drops into the negative, your citizens may revolt, and sometimes you might find a city seceding from your civilization and becoming independent or joining another AI-controlled empire.

4th and 5th Basics: I’d like to talk about them together as they are the most important basics of the game and the core pillars that drive it: culture and science. At the beginning of each age, there is a separate progression tree for culture and one for science. As shown in the image below, you choose what you want to focus on in your civilization for that age, as you usually can’t unlock all advancements in one age, whether in culture or science, because each advancement takes a certain number of turns to complete. Therefore, you need to focus on increasing your civilization’s culture and technology (or science) rates because the higher they are, the less time advancements take to complete, allowing you to develop the next advanced thing and so on.

6- Production: The higher its number, the fewer turns you need to complete building the structures you want in your cities. These structures are important as they increase the basics mentioned above, whether it’s money, technology, or culture. The gameplay is a complete cycle that requires the player’s focus to enjoy, and trust me, once you enjoy it, you’ll easily get addicted and say the famous phrase: “One more turn!”

Winning the Game: Legacy Paths 🏆

After discussing the basics of the game, what is the goal of the game or how do you win? First, you need to know that gameplay on a single map takes long hours and sometimes days, depending on your playstyle and planning. To win the game, you need to be the top among your opponents in terms of Legacy points. Legacy paths are of four types: military achievements (red), economic (yellow), scientific (cyan), and cultural (purple), as shown in the image below. Each of the four achievements has different goals in each age, and the game doesn’t punish you at all for changing the achievement you want to complete. You can change your playstyle at any time. But to be the winner of the game, you need to outperform your AI opponents by achieving more total legacy points than them at the end of the Modern Age in the four mentioned categories. This is done by completing as many goals as possible in as many categories as possible. Completing these goals gives you a significant boost and a strong reduction in the time needed to unlock the next age. Additionally, the game gives you a development point for your character to enhance a specific aspect, whether it’s economy, science, wars, etc., after completing the goals, which are in the form of tasks. The game also guides you to achieve these goals, leading you to victory as explained.

Battles: Planning and Strategy ⚔️

Battles in the game are honestly my favorite aspect throughout my playtime. This is because each civilization has its own unique soldiers. In the Antiquity Age, all soldiers are similar in strength and equipment, but as you enter the Middle and Modern Ages, the characteristics of each civilization’s troops start to form. You can also reach later advancements that allow you to upgrade your soldiers to higher levels. The Modern Age is the most enjoyable in my opinion in terms of wars and battles because you can engage in multiple types of battles, whether through infantry, tanks, and heavy weapons, or in the ocean with ships, which you can later upgrade to massive warships. You can also develop aircraft and fight your opponents, surprising their cities from the air, which becomes a special moment, especially if you’re the first in the game to reach the invention of military aircraft. You can exploit this advantage to easily take new cities after weakening their defenses, as the opponent hasn’t yet developed anti-aircraft defenses. But be careful not to exceed the number of cities in your civilization, as exceeding the allowed number affects citizen happiness, which starts to decrease until it reaches negative levels. One last point I want to discuss about battles is that each group of soldiers or combat unit, like cannons and tanks, takes up a full square, i.e., an entire city. It’s better to first create a leader for a battalion or fleet that includes a group of ships moving as one unit while occupying a single square. Once you face the enemy, you start breaking down the army into groups on multiple squares and then direct attacks on your opponent from all the soldiers surrounding them, as long as you have a battalion leader issuing attack orders. Therefore, you need to employ and manage soldiers correctly to outperform your opponent in battle. You can also develop soldiers’ skills through the army leader, who gains new abilities with each enemy defeated. These abilities vary between defensive and offensive capabilities, abilities that increase soldiers’ movement speed on the map, or abilities that reduce the cost of creating and maintaining them.

Free Peoples: Diplomacy or War 🕊️

The last thing I want to talk about in the gameplay is the Free Peoples, who have replaced the Barbarians in previous installments. When you encounter their locations on the map, you have two options: either fight and eliminate them completely or use diplomacy with them by using influence points to start forming friendships and alliances. As the relationship between you flourishes, you can even integrate them into your civilization under your leadership.

AI: Between Pros and Cons 🤖

One last and very important point I want to talk about in this game review is the AI. In my opinion, AI is the backbone of strategy games, making them last for years. In Civilization 7, I’d say the AI is just okay—not bad enough to be criticized, but not revolutionary like I was hoping for. It’s pretty average, and sometimes even below that.

For example, it’s nice that if you’re in an alliance with an AI-controlled leader and you declare war on another opponent, your AI ally will automatically attack the enemy’s cities and even conquer them without you having to tell them what to do. That’s a good thing!

But other times, the AI feels broken or not smart at all. For instance, if you or your enemy decide to sign a peace treaty, sometimes the AI offers peace without asking for anything in return—or even gives you one of their cities for free. The weird part is that if you try to ask for an extra city in the deal, the AI might accept a big city but refuse to give you a small island instead, which makes no sense.

I believe these AI issues will be fixed in upcoming patches and updates.

Final Rating

7.5/10

Game Pros 🌟

+ If you are a new player, the game is relatively easy because they simplified many systems compared to previous versions. However, there aren’t enough tutorials to guide you, but this can be fixed with an update.
+ The graphics are realistic with a different and better style than Civilization 6, which had a more cartoonish look. The terrain, soldiers, and buildings are detailed and colorful.
+ The gameplay is smooth and addictive as always.
+ War atmosphere and battle mechanics are well-designed in this version.
+ The online mode is very fun and adds many hours of gameplay, especially if you get bored playing against AI in single-player mode.
+ The soundtrack is amazing as usual, featuring musical influences from different cultures like Arabic, European, and East Asian.

Game Cons ⚠️

– I didn’t like the idea of switching civilizations at the end of each era. I preferred keeping the same civilization from the ancient to the modern age, just like in previous games. It doesn’t make sense to start as Ancient Egypt, then move to the Abbasid era, and then the French Revolution with the same cities and leader!

– Natural disasters were heavily advertised as a major feature, but they barely impact gameplay. You can repair damaged buildings with some money, and after a while, they just feel repetitive and annoying.

– The UI and menus are missing some shortcuts that would make gameplay smoother, similar to previous games. Also, many important details and explanations are either missing or too brief.

– The Legacy progress system feels underwhelming because the game always asks you to achieve the same goals for all leaders, with no real variety!

– No Arabic language support, even though the game relies heavily on text and menus. It’s disappointing to see such an important language ignored, especially with a growing demand for localization in this type of game.

Conclusion: A promising game that needs more content 🛠️

Civilization games always feel incomplete at launch compared to previous versions. Over time, after expansions and DLCs are released, the game eventually reaches its full potential. That’s why I’m not surprised that there aren’t many groundbreaking new features to justify the high $70 price tag. Some elements feel missing, and I hope they get added in future updates. The core gameplay is solid, but it needs more content from the developers to truly shine.