The Internet can’t decide if Civilization 7 is good or not (though the critic average is generally favorable), and most of the discussion comes down to whether streamlining the overall experience was a good idea. It’s complicated to properly answer because Civilization 7 remains a complex game, but I can tell you its new approach to game pace and ages works wonderfully well when you’re on a trip.
Earlier this month, I visited London and Oxford for the first time. It wasn’t my first time in the UK though. Anyway, things were off to a terrible start when a nightmare scenario played out in front of my eyes: My mobile phone died (as in fully dead) after the regular reboot to make the roaming services properly start. It’s not a great feeling. I’ll spare you the details, but I made it to the hotel I’d set up as a rendezvous point and waited for my partner (who was already in the UK) to show up. At this point, Civilization 7 had made the whole experience a bit more bearable already.
The single greatest decision I made before heading to the airport was throwing my Steam Deck into a bag. I wasn’t sure I’d have enough ‘free’ time outside of doing touristy things, but I decided it’d make the flights better at the very least. When the worst happened, it also replaced my doomscrolling time and, more importantly, it allowed me to ‘disconnect’ from being worried sick about something I couldn’t fix (one of my toxic traits, ha) whenever I wasn’t walking around London/Oxford or talking to my girlfriend.
Experts say we shouldn’t do it, but most of us do it. I’m talking about extra ‘portable screen’ time before going to sleep. Lying on the hotel bed and too tired to do anything else, hour-long sessions of Civilization 7 became my sleeping pills. It was fun enough to keep me awake until I felt too tired, but also kind of chill, which was just what I needed. There were plenty of other games loaded up on my Deck that I could’ve chosen, but the latest Civilization simply felt perfect. (Also: I needed to put in the time for a review.)
Whereas Civilization 6 often felt a bit too much for portable hardware when it came to controls – I thought the Switch port was pretty neat otherwise – Civilization 7 simply works remarkably well out of the box with gamepad controls. I’m guessing that’s the main reason behind much of the systems streamlining (it’s a first launch-day multiplat. release for the series). We can discuss all day long about whether basing so much of the overall game design on the needs of consoles versus the more loyal PC platform was a good call, but at the end of the day, I had a great uncomplicated time playing the game on the Deck.
I’d be lying if I said the beginning of my experience with the game was a smooth one though. You see, the pre-release build wasn’t perfect when it came to the Steam Deck controls despite the game sporting the ‘verified’ mark from the get-go. It was often a bit unresponsive, and some submenus I just couldn’t figure out with a gamepad for the life of me. A few minutes later, I was using touchscreen quite often. It wasn’t ideal, but hey, Civilization 7 was working well enough on Valve’s little brave machine with minimal tinkering. Neat!
Eventually, you get the hang of things. It’s hard to adjust to both an all-new Civilization experience (7 really shakes things up) and playing a 4X game with gamepad controls, a perverse act which my brain tries to forget every single time as fast as possible. I played a bunch of Civilization 6 on Switch, and I found it to be largely fine, but it’s the kind of activity that also feels just wrong. Give me a keyboard and the snappiness and freedom of a mouse for that, please.
Civilization 7 was built with that in mind. Firaxis knew that simply adapting a ‘PC first’ experience to consoles was never going to feel 100% fine. This new installment doesn’t either, but it lands close enough to make me go “ah, I could get used to playing this all the time on my Deck.” There’s less micromanaging. There are fewer layers of decision-making that require extra clicks. You don’t have to move builders around every turn. Every creative decision of that sort helps the gamepad (and portable) experience feel less miserable and closer to genuinely fun. This was key to making me stick with the game throughout my trip and not gradually go back to Vampire Survivors and Hades.
By sheer luck, I fixed my phone during the last night of my UK stay after getting it to properly reboot and formatting the system (thank God for cloud backups). I celebrated my victory over technology (actually, I’d been defeated) for a few minutes before just booting Civilization 7 back up. “Return to tradition,” I muttered to myself. The absence of social media cringe and low-quality memes was affecting my brain. Maximizing my Science yield could fix me.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably guessing I like Civilization 7 quite a bit. You aren’t wrong. Overall, this installment doesn’t feel like a downgrade. It’s more of a new, more ‘lightweight’ way to experience Civilization. I genuinely believe it wasn’t meant to replace 5 and 6. Firaxis likely thought that was a stupid battle to fight given how the community has embraced them over the years as the crown jewels of the 4X genre, so they instead went in a completely different direction. If Ara: History Untold chose to double down on the overlap with grand strategy titles, then Civilization 7 represents a calmer move in the opposite direction.
A long-running, highly profitable series choosing to heavily rework a tried-and-tested formula is always worth celebrating even if many of the swings don’t connect. It’s very likely that we won’t be seeing some key features from Civilization 7 return in the future, but at the same time, this series traditionally wins skeptics over with major updates and expansion packs, so don’t jump ship just yet. For all we know, it could be the beginning of a new age for a genre that was feeling a bit stagnant as of late.
Published: Feb 22, 2025 10:00 PM UTC