Other nations forget to build roads and inevitably lag behind you in scientific advances, something that compounds their short-sightedness as you discover that researching many new technologies first grants extra bonuses like free buildings or free units. There's no world map in a game that encourages global conquest. Great People, key resources that can give considerable boosts to your progress, are left idle by the AI, just waiting to be captured and co-opted. Settlers don't improve terrain or build roads in this Civilization, only founding cities. The more you play it, the more it appears lacking, even immature.
While it's certainly a fine-looking iOS game, with a well realised 3D world, shiny presentation and a very sleek interface (though overlong battle animations outstay their welcome and some buttons are a too tiny on iPhones), it eschews the nuance that the series has so carefully developed. When there isn't, there are moments of elegant smoothness: moments where the game quietly shifts your units according to your advance orders, skips a few turns while nothing happens, fast-forwards you towards your next decision.īut it can also feel rather primitive, as if Civilization Revolution 2 has taken a step backward rather than the step sideways that the first Revolution took. Even this less complicated incarnation of Civilization is still a game packed with technologies, units, concepts and systems and there's almost always something to think about next. There's rarely any downtime and the impetus is always to expand or to strengthen your nation, to grow so as not to stagnate. Still, if your opponents do nothing else, they certainly give the game a sense of pace by always pressing at your borders, always standing by to exploit any weakness you might present. Believe it not, that's a spy, not a superhero.Īt lower difficulty levels, their ignorance makes them an inconvenience against your ambitions, but up the challenge and they evolve into aggressive, belligerent and demanding opponents, though still never quite graduating to appreciable intelligence. Your diplomatic options are rudimentary and your opponents are far more interested in fighting you than each other, generally inclined to make their cities little more than recruiting centres and prioritising military might over the need for culture or technology.
As you gradually reach outward, pushing back the fog of war that hangs over whatever earth the game has randomly generated this time, you meet rivals that are as stupid as they are aggressive, each of them with a paint-by-numbers vision of the world map that only has room for their nation's colour. It's something that makes Civilization Revolution 2 behave much like its oldest, crankiest and most flawed ancestor, the very first Civilization. This is a world forever on the brink of war. From the earliest days of your civilization, you must always prepare for the ever-present threat of conflict. While all victory conditions are possible, the game is most often nudging you toward the latter. The best nation is that which either wins a space race to Alpha Centauri, blesses the world with twenty Wonders and Great People, amasses a tremendous pile of cash or captures four rival capitals. It's still a game about cultural superiority, taking the core tenet of Civilization: the challenge of building a nation from prehistory to the fringe of posthumanism while competing with rival nations in the fields of technology, culture and military might. The first depicts the American Revolution. The game promises new Live Events, pre-made scenarios that will be added regularly. Now, it's a strictly single-player experience brought to iOS devices and, in slimming itself down even further, it's starting to look just a bit too thin. Its tech trees are subtly trimmed, its worlds are smaller, its diplomacy gets to the point.īut unlike its predecessor - beloved of so many console gamers because it gave them the opportunity to fight their friends for world domination and be in bed by nine - Civilization Revolution 2 drops the multiplayer component that was its strongest sell.
A diet Civ that offers that same, great taste, but which can be completed in an afternoon instead of a long weekend. While its peers have gradually grown both more complex and more nuanced, it instead wants to present a leaner, sleeker alternative. Like its predecessor, it can't be doing with most of the advancements and additions the rest of the series has carefully developed over the last two decades.