You can terraform the land, not only doing regular worker stuff like making tile improvements and roads and stuff, you can also raise or lower terrain to form artificial mountains (which can alter the weather), plant or remove native plant life, create new rivers, new islands, all kinds of stuff. Same goes with your government, tech gives you different aspects of government and society that give various bonuses. New techs give you parts to build units with, not just new units, so all your units can be ones you designed yourself. It gives the most customization of all the civ games. It'll be a shame if we have to wait that long again.SMAC is one of my favorite games of all time, and it's certainly my favorite civ, so I might be a little biased towards it. We waited nearly two decades for a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri. And if you play on smaller maps, you can avoid some of that endgame slog.īut it's too bad this couldn't have been a grander, bolder break from a game system we've been saddled with since 2010. It's the best this approach to a Civilization game is going to get. If you missed Civilization V, Beyond Earth is probably going to seem fresh and maybe even exciting. But in the end it's just decision-grinding-shoving a vast wheel up a mountain, an inch at a time. The game tries to jazz things up by asking you to weigh in on decision forks that grant trifling bonuses, and the new Virtue system adds another bonus-granting layer that rolls out selectable strength or growth or scientific perks as your influence grows. Instead of cracking this aspect of the game open, the Cover Ops section in which you can enact subterfuge against other cities feels like busywork after the first few run-throughs, just reassigning agents to do the same things (with hip new names) that they've been doing in this series forever.īut it's the long game that brings Beyond Earth crashing back to earth: Eventually, you're just banging the "next turn" button, letting the game's automated systems execute, watching the factional "processing turn" counters flip, waiting for something interesting to happen. There's just no time between the alien corralling game or the terraforming one to care much about what the colonist A.I.'s up to. On the other hand, unless you're aggressively expansionist, your interactions with other factions tend to be either feckless banter or same-ol' horse trading (diplomacy's as dull as ever, a menu of conversational levers that give little sense of the gears they're moving). During this phase, you're still poring over the map like it's an interesting place to be. Every two or three hexes there's a mess in need of cleanup or a threat that demands tackling. Canyons and mountains frame logjams of alien nests defended by hyper-vigilant squads of alien wolf beetles, raptor bugs, manticores and drones. Miasma-saturated hexes sap unit health and take a lot of work to either clear up or figure out how to exploit. It's here the game feels the least like Civilization V, more so because you're having to jockey your explorers and workers and soldiers around in a topographical straightjacket. ![]() Attack them, and you're batting a karmic hornet's nest that over time can bring the planet's collective xenomorphs (mostly bug-like, with the odd Dune worm or space-kraken tossed in) crashing down on you like an extraterrestrial hammer. Ignore them and they'll swarm and block your growth and inevitably attack. Instead of fending off anemic barbarian tribes, you're sharing turf with minor armies of natives. It's the early game, where they're just distant dots on the map, that is as close as Beyond Earth gets to riveting. still culture.ĭepending how you play, of course, the other factions matter less than the aliens. Other key variables just swap names: gold is now "energy," happiness is now "health," and culture is. ![]() ![]() Most of *Civilization V'*s initial shortcomings (like its abysmal A.I.) were finessed in its expansions, and Beyond Earth picks up a few of their better improvements, including trade routes and espionage. Developer Firaxis tilled interstellar ground once before with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in 1996, a riff on Civilization II that picked up where that game ended: Reach for the stars, colonize a hostile planet, integrate (or exploit) the indigenous lifeforms and fool with metaphysical gobbledygook like "sentient econometrics," "transcendent thought" and "the singularity" distilled down to abilities and modifiers that helped sculpt your passive-aggressive tromp toward victory.īeyond Earth plays the same cards, but flaunts *Civilization V'*s DNA, which means bigger cities, slower build queues (to mitigate sprawl, since units can't stack) and maneuvering across hexes instead of orthogonal grids.
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