App Review: Civilization

review by Steve Loopipe

If you follow the iPhone news sites closely enough. it’s hard to be surprised by anything when it appears on the App Store; between developers eager to announce their new apps and Apple’s ever lengthening review process, you generally have a fair amount of notice in advance. That’s why it was so surprising when I woke up one Monday and found that Civilization Revolution was suddenly available for purchase. “Not that Civilization,” I thought. But yes, in fact, it was an official iPhone version of Civilization, developed by Take Two Games, who developed both Civilization IV for the PC and Civilization Revolution for the Xbox 360, Playstation3 and Nintendo DS. I was skeptical that a real Civilization game could work on the iPhone, but I downloaded the Lite version anyway. By that evening, I’d paid for the full version, and while it cost me more than any other app I’ve purchased, I haven’t regretted the decision for a minute.

For the uninitiated, the Civilization (or Civ, as its players typically refer to it) is a long-running series of turn-based strategy games that starts off with a single settlement in ancient times, and allows the player to build the nation up into modern times. You can accomplish this via military conquest, enhancing your civilization’s culture to attract a number of great people to settle in your cities, amassing enough gold to control the world economically, or advancing scientifically to the point where you can send a spaceship to Alpha Centauri.

The iPhone version of Civilization, Civilization Revolution, is based off of the series’ first entry that was specifically designed for consoles as opposed to computers. As a result, experienced Civilization players may find it significantly scaled down as compared to, say, Civilization IV. That said, the scaled back iteration actually suits the iPhone quite well, as it allows the player to get a fairly complete Civilization experience without getting bogged down with the interface, while more advanced options are available for those players who want them. For example, a large part of city management is deciding which tiles around a city will be worked by citizens, as each tile produces either food (which helps a city grow), production (to construct buildings and military units), or trade (to contribute to money or science). The player can choose to place the workers individually, but there are also buttons to simply maximize one of those aspects, which is what a player will want to do 90% of the time, especially when they are first starting out.

This is one of those games that sounds like a really great idea, but would expect to fail in execution. Happily, it turns out that Civ Revolution works pretty well on the iPhone. The game strikes a really nice balance between staying true to the series and staying simple for playability’s sake. Even toward the end of the game, when the full map is revealed and all the competing civilizations have multiple units moving around the map, the game never really feels sluggish, even on the iPod Touch 2G (though playing on a first-gen iPhone or iPod Touch could prove a bit dicier). Not being a hardcore Civ player anymore (though I did spend more hours than I’d like to admit playing Civ II in college), the game depth and length felt perfect for a portable version; games last two to three hours on average, which feels right.

That’s not to say that the game is perfect, however; there are a few problems that, while not enough to discourage me from wanting to play, can be a bit annoying when they crop up. The most annoying is that the game has the tendency to crash, especially toward the late stages of the game. This wouldn’t be quite so bad if it autosaved for you regularly, as opposed to only when you exit out of the game normally (by pressing the home button or quitting to the phone to take a call, for example), but it doesn’t. The game does prompt you to save your game occasionally, but those prompts are few and far between.

Less devastating but equally frustrating is unit movement. If you want to move within a single screen’s worth of terrain, movement is great; you just drag your unit where you want it to go. If you want to send it a long distance away, however, you need to choose “Move Unit” and keep tapping on the edge of the screen until you finally get to your destination. It’s unnecessarily tedious and counter-intuitive, since your natural instinct is to simply drag your finger to the edge of the screen and hold it there as the screen scrolls to where you want to go. One other minor complaint is the lack of multiplayer, which is understandable but still disappointing nonetheless.

All that said, however, Civilization Revolution is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the Civilization series to the very small screen. Even at the game’s original $10 asking price, it would have been one of the few games in the App Store that could justify being that expensive; at its current price of $5, it’s well worth a purchase, especially given that the console versions of the game retail for $20-$30, depending on your system of choice. Just be prepared to set aside some time; it’s true that you can put the game down at any time and pick up later where you left off, but that doesn’t mean you’ll want to.

Civilization Revolution is available for $4.99 in the App Store. Civilization Revolution Lite is available for free in the App Store