Civilization Revolution

Technically, I've beaten this game before. I did so on the DS, long ago and before there was a Back-Blogged site on which to talk about it. Still, when I learned that this was Xbox 360's free game of the half-month for early March, I knew I had to grab it; already beaten or not, Civilization Revolution has a ton of replay value, like any Civilization game, and why not load up on some quick and dirty Xbox achievement points while having fun with a great franchise? Last night I fired up the Xbox and started playing a "quick game." Big mistake; there's no such thing as a quick game of Civilization.

More accurately, there's no such thing as a short session of Civilization. The game itself probably only took about two hours, and I blew every other civilization out of the water as Abe Lincoln's Americans, so it was really just a prolonged process of having fun with a detailed world-and-war-and-culture simulator. My cities and military units and technology quickly grew exponentially more advanced than that of my neighbors and as such the game only got easier as it went on. I'll credit that to an unseen difficulty setting that I'll assume started out on "easy." But then, maybe Civilization Revolution is just meant to serve as an entryway into the franchise for console gamers. I'll be back soon enough, I'm sure, trying other playthroughs and getting more achievements. I'd love to try some online multiplayer, but I fear it'd be slow as hell, withe me spending 80% of my time waiting for other people's moves in a 5-player game. Or maybe they've streamlined it in some way.

Anyway, this one's still free with an Xbox Live Gold subscription for a few more days. I highly, highly recommend it. The game isn't for everyone and it has a steep learning curve but there's substantial variety to the game including something like a dozen different civilizations to play as and four different victory conditions. And given that you can play through a game in two or three hours, it's really not a significant burden to any backlog.