Civilization 7: The Final Preview

ign.com:

Nobody should envy Firaxis. Once a decade or so, the legendary strategy game developer is asked to reinvent Civilization, a video game series that has been absent of any tangible weak points for quite some time. Nearly every entry has presented different flavors of that turn-based 4X recipe, but it's hard to say that any one is substantially superior to the others. So, that is the burden that Civilization 7 carries with it. Here is a game that, after playing through the first of its three distinct eras, is shaping up to be very good, but the fact that it’s introducing a huge number of major tweaks and reinterpretations that—in both small ways and big—provide a brand-new way to play Civ means that it asks of its veteran players to enter with an open mind.

If you are new to this series, please know that the basic colors of Civilization 7 adhere to the time-tested formula: telling the story of humanity, one turn and one hex at a time. You begin nurturing a teensy village, armed with club-weilding warriors and torchlight, and evolve it into a globe-bestriding empire by balancing their cultural, scientific, diplomatic, and warfighting needs. Countless subsystems are woven into this pursuit, and when Civilization is at its best, it’s easy to enter something of a psychedelic zen as you remix human history. The marquee new feature of Civilization 7, which we detailed at length in IGN's original preview last August. Rather than selecting one nation and charting a path to victory, you’ll wield control of a consistent leader, but you’ll switch from your original civilization to two others throughout history—which is divided into three ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern—before a win can be secured.

Some Civilization fans were understandably nervous about this pivot. It's a big change! One of the things people love most about the previous six games and their spinoffs is their ability to tell strange and funny stories, creating a timeline where, say, the dogmatically Catholic