Amazon.com: Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution: Xbox 360: Video Games

64 Reviews

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

Average Customer Review

3.7 out of 5 stars (64 customer reviews)

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33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent transition, July 10, 2008

By	DM (Chicago, USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

The good:
- One of the most addicting games of all times makes its way to Xbox and the transition is very smooth. While this version has been re-written specially for consoles, it does keep most of the original gameplay. If you haven't done this already, download the demo and see for yourselves what this is all about.
- The game has 5 difficulty settings. For those of you that had trouble beating the demo - worry not. The easiest setting is extremely easy - unlike it was in the demo.
- All 16 civilizations are available right from the start. You can select any of them and play through skirmish missions, Game of the Week or a set of modified skirmishes. This last one has around 10-15 'missions' where the Skirmish rules have been changed. For example - on one map there are more and tougher barbarians, on other there is no diplomacy, etc. Game of the Week is being updated every Sunday and will allow you to play against the AI, in same exact conditions as all other XBox Live players. Then - you will be able to see your rank versus other players in the world.
- The version of the game that I bought includes a free 'wonders' code, to be used for downloading extra wonders. Did not try it yet, so do not know yet what is included.
- Graphics are excellent - a bit cartoonish, but perfect for the gameplay. There doesn't seem to be any noticeable improvement over the graphics from the demo, so what you see in the demo is what you will get.
- The Manual is excellent. Gives a lot of detail and covers all the info you need. If you play on Easiest setting, the game will also act like a Tutorial, which is helpful, if you have never played this before.

The bad:
- You have no control over skirmishes. Basically, all maps are randomly generated - which is great, because you never get to play the same map. However - if you want to select map size, number of players, individual difficulty for AI players - this is not possible.
- I was hoping the game will have a Campaign, that you can play with your favorite Civilization. There is none. This being the case - not sure how long will it take for the fun to wear out.
- There is a lot of slowdown when the camera has to pan on longer distances. Not sure why - the Xbox 360 demo did not have these issues. It's not unplayable, but it gets annoying after a while.
- There isn't enough diversity between the civilizations. Each civilization has some special units, but there isn't enough of them. Most of the time, you will play with same units.

Overall: if you are new to this or unsure - try the demo. Otherwise - give this game a try. Despite some minor annoyances, it's definitely worth it!

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21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Civilization now more civilized, July 10, 2008

By	Brad Oneill (Phoenix AZ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

This is the Civilization I have been waiting for! I have played through a full campaign and I have to say I love it. I love not having to build every road and micromanaging every square. They left all the good parts in but removed the tasks that became mundane towards the end of the other Civ titles.

It has the same technology trees as the other civ games so if you are familiar with them you will catch on quickly.

Multiplayer games now finish in 2-4 hours instead of 12 hours like the previous iterations of this franchise.

If you enjoyed Civ but were longing for faster game play this is the game for you.

This is what every turned based strategy war game should strive for.

the only problem I had with the game was the advisor and enemy animations were annoying to me at first but after the tutorial guy went away the other advisors kind of grew on me.

If world domination is a goal of yours and you don't think your current career track is going to get you there I highly recommend this game as the next closest thing.

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19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It Was Fun For a Few Hours, July 28, 2008

By	J.S. Knapp "ViperMan" (Harrisburg, PA) - See all my reviews

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars

I'll admit from the start that I'm more a fan of real-time strategy games. But since RTS games on consoles still haven't measured up to PC performance, I decided to give this game a rent. I'm glad I only spent $8 instead of $60!

It's a GOOD game - I had fun playing it... ...the first few times. After that it became very repetitive and I felt it growing old very quickly. In just one week of renting the game, I beat a game with every civilization (there are 16 if I recall) and won a game via every available method - Conquest, Technological, Financial, and Cultural. I finally reverted to the "lightning round" scenario games which only lasted about 15 minutes each.

I found that the maps - essentially a globe - were often very tight spaces and made expansion difficult to control. It was often challenging enough to find ROOM to place a city, nevermind finding good placement for producing various resources. This wasn't always an issue, but seemed to be the case more often than not.

The gibberish from the "assistants" quickly became annoying. I don't understand how, with gaming as advanced as it is today, characters can't TALK to us. My car talks to me, for crying out loud.

The end of each game is where things became the most frustrating. Often times I would simply be riding from turn to turn, trying to let every possible "great person" appear before time ran out. I would have 10-15 cities, each with every possible building upgrade. Yet every turn, I would be asked "What do you want to build in [city name.]" I didn't want to build anything! And to make matters worse, if you would start building a unit, there was no way to end production of that unit. The only option was to build a wonder, which would then complete the game. Furthermore, if the city builds a building and then you give it no additional item to build, it will store your production credits. Later, when you decide you want ONE military unit, it'll use all of it's stored production credits and build as many units as those credits will allow. One time, I tried to build ONE spy in a city that had been dormant for many turns - it built 57 of them!! This forced me to sit for a few minutes selling 56 of them back for gold credits.

The biggest downfall to Civ-Rev is a limited range of reuse. Yes there are 4 methods to victory and 16 different civilizations. There are also different scenarious that may place bigger emphasis on fighting Barbarians, or using naval strategy - even one that places you on a different planet and replaces Barbarians with Aliens. These give you a different look to things, but the game still plays the same. The only challenges left at that point are earning Xbox achievements, and some of them - such as winning each victory type in Deity difficulty (the hardest of 5 difficulties) can be downright impossible to some.

Some other quick notes - you can scroll quicker using the right stick - select a unit, right-stick scroll to where you want it to move, then just use the left stick to select the specific "tile" you want it to travel to. The lack of a better zoom in OR out was annoying. Yes you can zoom out, but not by much, and it is tediously slow. The ability to rush construction of units or buildings was helpful, as was the ability to cease production of a building and convert those credits to a unit. That came in especially helpful when an army would show up at my door and I had no defending units.

Give it a rent and have fun with it. But only those desperate to conquer the world with a console controller in their hands should consider this a needed purchase.