Civilization VII preview: The most complete package since IV

Making the seventh Civilization game is a tall order. With six prior entries, each with a different flavor, it's challenging to create a unique identity to get people to buy it while ensuring it’s familiar enough that it doesn’t drive longtime fans away.

This week, I spent 15 hours playing Civilization VII—which is slated for release next month—through two of its three ages: Antiquity and Exploration. That’s enough time to know that this is the most radical overhaul yet in a single new release without any expansions.

Regardless, my initial impressions are that this is also a return to form for the series. Like many others, I had gripes about Civilization VI. To be clear, VII isn’t a reset to pre-VI times; some concepts introduced in VI (like the hex-based city district system) are revisited and refined here.

But there’s a lot to like here for new and old players if you have an open mind. A full review is coming early next month, but for now, here are a few initial observations from a long-time Civilization geek.

For first-time or lapsed players

As always, the developers of Civilization VII want this to be an ideal starting point for players new to the franchise or those who’ve gone a decade or more without starting up a game.

I’ve played at least a few full games of Civilization a year since about 1996, so it’s difficult to speak to the uninitiated experience. But let me try to make an informed guess about how appealing this will be for new players.

The tutorials are improved compared to earlier entries. They’re clearly worded, and they closely guide at the very beginning. Nonetheless, coming to the game from nothing involves reading numerous pop-up text boxes. It’s nowhere near as overwhelming as what you face when learning Crusader Kings III or Europa Universalis IV, but it’s still a lot.

Any prior familiarity with 4X-style games like this will make a big difference, though.

You can recruit city-states into your civilization, but they start as towns, where you have to spend gold to add new buildings.

Credit: Samuel Axon

This is the best game to start with, if only because the systems are more clearly laid out and easier to understand. Some prior Civ titles had opaque systems, where even experienced players would ask, “Why is that happening?” I haven’t felt that way about VII.

As for players who haven’t played a Civ game since V, IV, or even earlier, I was disappointed that, unlike in other recent entries, there weren’t different tutorial presets. Some other games in the series allowed the player to say whether they were completely new to Civilization or just the new concepts introduced in that particular title. As far as I can tell, there’s just one tutorial path here. That means that folks coming from Civilization V will want tutorials on how city district adjacency bonuses work, but to get that, they’ll also have to put up with tutorials about stuff that hasn’t changed since the dawn of the franchise, like building cities.

That’s a little annoying, sure, but it’s only an issue for the first couple of hours. After that, the tutorials are less of an issue and only appear when new concepts are introduced as you progress through the ages.

Fully fleshed out

Playing through two of the three ages gave me full access to almost all of the game’s big systems, and the breadth of those systems is the most impressive thing about Civilization VII. I can already tell this game is more fully fleshed out at launch than V or VI were.

With both of those, I felt enough systems had been cut from the previous title (and left to be reintroduced in expansions) that they felt a bit barebones when they came out. That’s not the case with Civilization VII. It has brought over (and sometimes expanded upon) almost all the systems that were in VI.

Sure, a couple from VI (like the global warming system) didn’t make it, but the ones that didn’t were my least favorite ones, so I’m not complaining.

A visual return to form

Since I'm comparing prior titles, I prefer VII’s visual presentation to VI’s. It’s closer to what we got in V, which many felt was the best-looking Civ title—at least until now.

Civilization VII is not a city-building game, but its cities look more impressive than before as they gradually sprawl out through hexes adjacent to where they were founded.

Credit: Samuel Axon

On top of that, the graphics are noticeably more detailed. Cities look awesome as they slowly grow out of their origin hex with new types of buildings and public squares. When the age changes, so does the architecture. Firaxis definitely achieved its stated objective of capturing the feeling of an old, sprawling city expanding itself in distinct historical or cultural layers.

Age transitions feel like starting a new game

The most significant change compared to prior titles is the game's completely new approach to ages. In most of the earlier games, ages were called "eras" (like Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, or Modern) and were just signposts to show how far you’d gone through the tech tree. Sometimes, certain buildings would be gated behind eras, but they weren’t really a system unto themselves.

Civilization VI introduced ages as a complementary concept to eras. There was a sort of boom-and-bust cycle of golden and dark ages, where you’d try to achieve one or the other in the next cycle to gain certain bonuses.

Confusingly, the ages in VII mostly resemble eras of past games and include some of the ideas from VI’s ages, while also totally overhauling the whole concept.

There are now just three ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Each has its own totally distinct tech tree, and each has gameplay systems that are entirely relevant in that age and only that age.

Each age also has its own paths and success metrics, akin to classic victory conditions. Yes, there are Science victories for the Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern Ages, but the specific goals in the Science victory vary between them.

There's a dedicated screen for tracking your progress in each Age, with differing objectives for each.

Credit: Samuel Axon

When an age concludes, it feels like the end of a classic game of Civilization. A recap screen shows how different civilizations did on their goals for the age, with rankings that make it clear who (if anyone) came out on top.

When you begin the next age, it's like starting a new game entirely, except the city placement and other starting conditions are defined by which conditions you met in the game you played before. (I’m told this resembles how the Civilization-like Humankind works, but I haven’t played that game, so I can’t elaborate on that.)

This is by far the most radical change we’ve ever seen in how Civilization plays. I really like it, though. It’s hard to articulate why it feels so much better, but I think it’s because it provides more frequent and meaningful payoffs for how you’ve been playing. It allows the game’s designers to go deeper with the systems when they don’t necessarily have to work the same way across the whole span of a playthrough.