The brand-new Civilization VII could be a lot better, and probably eventually will be
A mixed reaction for the newest Firaxis strategy game, from the public and from my family
The newest Civilization is not going over super well with the public, who on Steam are calling the game “blatantly unfinished” and in need of “a few more months of refinement.”
Reviews are “mixed” so far, among the crowd of PC players who can play it today, because they bought the $100 super-special edition. It’s not all bad. One of the more positive user reviews states “the pros of this game outweigh the cons,” before complaining that you have to sign up for an account with the game’s publisher to unlock Napoleon.
Critics’ reviews have been mixed, too. VGC called Civ VII “confident” and “sleek”. Polygon’s critic liked it but said it was “a little rough.” Eurogamer deemed it “dull.”
The new game tweaks the familiar Civilization premise of selecting a real world leader and guiding them to settle, develop and expand a civilization across a world map divided into hexagons. In Civ VII, that’s mostly still the case, though its turn-based adventure through fictionalized history is now divided into three ages. Players steer a different civilization through each age, pursuing shorter-term goals and playing within the rules and possibilities of the given age (For example: in antiquity, players manually connect settlements with dirt roads to forge trade routes; in the age of exploration, roads are automated and navigating the ocean becomes possible; in the modern age, railroads and ports facilitate intensified global commerce).
The knocks about the game feeling unfinished have largely involved Civ VII’s user interface, which is so simplified that there’s no way to quickly eyeball all of your units, nor spot important events occurring across the map, nor input shortcuts to speed your progress along.
My take on this Civ?
Here at Game File HQ, I was just hoping Civilization VII—an advanced copy of which was supplied by 2K Games— would go down well with my kids, twins now age 8. They had never played a Civ game, never even controlled a game with mouse-and-keyboard. Surely, nothing could go too wrong with the mighty franchise from Firaxis?
My daughter was into it for a half hour but wants to wait until we get the version we can play on the TV. So, no verdict there.
My son told me: “I like the game, and I like that you can win in certain ways, like you can eventually get rocket ships and technology. But the thing I don’t like is the wars and when a city of yours can get taken over.” None of that may be sequel-specific, but I get what he’s saying.
As for me, I’m reeling, simply because we chose to play Civ VII in a way that backfired and became a classic gamer-parent blunder.
After my daughter bailed and my son started a new civilization, I encouraged him to pursue a “cultural” victory. I thought we’d be building wonders and avoiding militaristic conquest, which is indeed how the first age went. Our city was looking amazing and we were having a fun time talking through the game’s tech tree. But cultural victory in Civ VII’s second age is a weird thing. You claim it by converting as many people on the planet to your religion.
Soon I was teaching my son a real-world lesson: Yes, in the game we need to figure out how to convert the Catholics here and the Muslims there to our made-up “bug” religion, but just so we’re clear, in the real world, forcing everyone to believe what you believe isn’t really how we want to interact with other cultures.
There was an ethical problem there, but also a design one.
Civ VII has no global map that’s color-coded to show where each religion has spread, so we had trouble figuring out where to send out our conquerors of the spirit. Or if it has such a view, we couldn’t find it. It also doesn’t help that each city or town has one religion that dominates the rural sectors and one that flourishes in the urban sectors—and that it’s not always easy to tell which hexagons are rural and which are urban. You need to know which is which so that your missionary stands in the right hex to start converting people. And why are the religion icons sometimes black? The in-game Civilopedia failed to explain.
Interfaith problems and interface problems…Civ VII’s got them both.
On the pro side, Civilization VII is very pretty. It’s satisfying to zoom in and see all the buildings, farms and wonders that cover its earth.
The game is also engrossing as ever. Civ VII is dense with decisions about social policies, governance structures, influence-peddling with other countries and a bevy of options to manage the catastrophes that strike near the end of an age. It’s all window-dressing for math of course, and ultimately about figuring out the ruthless arithmetic necessary to make one’s chosen quantification of human endeavor—culture, tech, money, conquest, etc—to go up.
Even Civ VII’s negative reviews on Steam frequently acknowledge that Firaxis’ game feels like it is some number of patches from being terrific. Getting a Civilization game itself into a victory state of quality is, at this point, also a turn-based endeavor.
It’s therefore not easy to say right now if this is a better Civilization or worse Civilization. It could still go either way. It’s simply another Civ, one the kids and I will play more of because it’s their first one and, at least in our house, that’s probably all it needs to be.
Item 2: In brief….
🎮 Iron Galaxy (Killer Instinct, Rumbleverse) is laying off 66 workers, and Probably Monsters, a company that said in 2022 that it had raised $250 million, is having another round of layoffs, per Game Developer.
A possible bright spot: Amir Satvat, the Tencent executive who has advocated for and advised many laid off game workers, believes that hiring in the industry is close to keeping up with job losses, Venture Beat reports.
👀 Take Two reported $1.37 billion in net bookings (player spending) for the three months ending December 31,2024, compared to the $1.3 billion announced for the same quarter at the end of 2023.
The company cited the "phenomenal" performance of NBA 2K, in terms of recurrent consumer spending, off-setting “under-performance” in hypercasual Zynga games and the decline of Grand Theft Auto Online.
Take Two reiterated a loaded slate of big-budget games for the rest of the calendar year, including Mafia: The Old Country (summer), Grand Theft Auto VI (fall) and Borderlands 4 (2025).
Company CEO Strauss Zelnick also noted during an earnings call today that “[w]e would fully expect to support Switch [2],” though he didn’t announce any specific release for it.
Take Two recently fired Michael Condrey, president of its 31st Union studio, following the muted response to the late 2024 unveiling of its live-service game Project Ethos, Kotaku reports. Condrey will continue to advise the project, 2K told the outlet.
👀 Electronic Arts reported $2.22 billion in net bookings (player spending) for the final three months of 2024, which the company had recently warned investors would be below the previously forecast $2.4-$2.55 billion bookings expected for the quarter.
A big culprit for the lower than expected revenue was softness in EA Sports FC. The latest FC’s popular new 5v5 rush mode may be distracting players from spending as much money on microtransactions, business professor Joost van Dreunen explains in his newsletter.
As for the underperformance of Dragon Age The Veilguard, CEO Andrew Wilson said the game “had a high-quality launch and was well reviewed by critics and those who played. However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.” He said that EA’s “blockbuster storytelling” games “need to directly connect to the evolving demand of players who increasingly seek shared world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category.” Translation: EA thinks Dragon Age needed some sort of live-service or social component to break through.
🎪 The Entertainment Software Association, the gaming industry trade group that previously ran the now-defunct E3 trade show, has announced iicon, an invitation-only April 2026 conference in Las Vegas “designed to connect visionaries, thought leaders and innovators from across industries to harness the power of interactive entertainment.”
🤔 A newly-published Nintendo patent appears to confirm the rumors that the Switch 2’s controllers can held edge-side-down and used like a computer mouse, Polygon reports.
I’m oddly excited about the ‘mousy’ joy cons. One thing the switch was good at that it never gets much credit for is being the best console for digital adaptations of tabletop games. Wingspan, Root, Everdell, Concordia and many more all seemed to come to the Switch either first or exclusively. Having something like a mouse might help it to double down on that and even bring in digital versions of heavier games such as the recent digital edition of Ark Nova.
> Amir Satvat, the Tencent executive who has advocated for and advised many laid off game workers, believes that hiring in the industry is close to keeping up with job losses
Based on headlines alone it would seem that only layoffs are occurring. Are there any kinds of headlines you could report movement in the opposite direction?