Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution
Reinventing the wheel.
That's why it's so fast, that's why there's so much emphasis on combat, that's why trade and diplomacy are all but absent. This isn't 'dumbed-down', as is the knee-jerk protestation of elitists, but there's no escaping that it's been made for a completely different audience to the usual Civ crowd. My concern is that its audience doesn't in fact exist, that it's an unnatural middle-ground between veteran Civ players and folk who run screaming from the very concept.
It's not stupid. There's plenty to think about, and you're viscerally rewarded for doing so. Often, I started feeling sorry for my rivals as, faced with a tank army smashing through their hopeless horsemen, they begged and begged me to let them live, pathetically offering up the last scraps of gold they had. If anything, there's far more focus on having a master plan from the very start than in the bigger Civs. The world is small and your rivals few but ever-present. If you don't have some idea of how you're intending to deal with them, you won't get anywhere. You'll learn the interface, you'll memorise the rock-paper-scissors of which units are best against which units, you'll twig that you need to manually shift cities' economies to focus on growth, production, science or cash as the situation requires.
And you'll learn this only by having an attentive mind over the course of several games. It's not stupid. For a lot of people, it may not be stupid enough, even.
Which is a little at odds with Civ Rev's biggest failing. As I suspected in the last preview, the game's too small. It's not 'too small compared to Civ IV'; it's just too small. While becoming really good at the game will take some time, the array of possible options and outcomes are almost all revealed after just two or three 1-3 hour sessions. You'll have researched every technology, built every unit, achieved every type of victory and conceived of every strategy. It does what it does do very well, with cheer, with accessibility and really very prettily, which is why discovering that, upon feeling you've gotten your head around it, there isn't much left to experiment with is so disappointing. It's the pop song that ends after 90 seconds - being an eight-minute epic would surely rob the joy from it, but dancing your heart out to just one more chorus would have made all the difference.
Which does, however, makes it ideally suited to multiplayer. Truly, this is a Civ you can play post-pub or pre-dinner, absolutely confident that the whole thing will wrap up before booze-oblivion or gnawing hunger calls an abrupt end to things. While alliances are possible, really you're playing it like a boardgame - you want to win, and so do the people you're playing with. You'll be in each other's faces all the time, and so Civ Rev's slimness simply won't matter - you'll want to make immediate response to their threats/lies/vulnerabilities, not to lose the sense of clear and present danger because you're lost in a sub-sub-sub-menu about city hygiene or something.
And so I reach the big number at the bottom, and it's one I don't enjoy putting there. This is easily one of the best strategy games on the current console generation, and much of that is specifically because it is a strategy game for console, not simply a PC strategy game on a console. I'd love for a great many people to play it, including those who've immediately decided they won't because it's about history and numbers. If I stuck a 9 on the bottom, perhaps some of them would.
Unfortunately, I'd be lying, as the many punches Civ Rev pulls means its exhilaration is so often followed by slight dissatisfaction. An 8 may not be enough to convince cynical minds to suck it and see, which is a terrible shame. This slick new Civilization may be more reduction than Revolution, but it's easily one of the most distinctive games on 360 and PS3. I can't see myself playing much more of the single-player, but I genuinely cannot wait to war over landmass with a few like-minded chums.