CIVILIZATION VI - £12.49 on steam

Jordan UK wrote:First play through done on standard a game and I think I'd give this an [8] so far.

I boshed through the game with little to no challenge from the other civs meaning that I didn't have to do a great deal of planning. Won a 'Religious' victory in the end. I only started pursuing this end when the other civs were crossing my borders with their missionaries and the occasional apostle, so thought I would retaliate. When I discovered I could buy missionaries and apostles with faith points (which I had accumulated loads of without really noticing), I just flooded their areas with them, converted their cities and eventually won this aspect. It was really odd that the other civs didn't try - in any way - to counter this. Not even the civ that was the founder of the most dominant religion at the time. It was a similar thing for the other victory conditions, too: by the end of the game I was three turns away from winning a scientific victory and my tourism probably would have been sufficient to win within about 10 turns (I won on turn 360 of 500).

Funnily enough, I was aiming for a domination victory at first and was trying my best to provoke the other civs into declaring war with me (building close to their borders, spies, buying-up land with resources on, closed borders, denouncing, patrolling near their borders, ignoring trade / embassy offers, ploughing resources into military tech and civics - basically anything I could do to thumb my nose at them) but they wouldn't take the bait! Not quite sure it was meant to be such a push over or I was just lucky with the randomly generated maps / opposition, but it really was a little too easy first time around on standard difficulty - I could have won in any number of ways.

I think I'll leave this for a while for a number of reasons: 1. It took nearly 23 hours for one standard play with little opposition, so most of the time I was clicking the turn counter on and repeating the same cycle of apostle spreading. 2. It was a little buggy for me (although my computer itself is being a bit temperamental at the moment) and I had to re-download the game once and now I can't even load an earlier save (I want to see the other victory conditions with my first civ). 3. Also, by virtue of the fact that I was winning on a lot of fronts, aside from the workings of the different units (which I didn't need to build / use), I think I've seen pretty much all of the building types, technologies and civics in my first go!

It's by no means a bad game - the artstyle is great, the new systems are straightforward but adaptable (once you've figured them out for yourself - the tutorials are quite limited for some aspects of the game), and performance wise - aside from the bugs - it is really smooth (I think I'll hook this up to my 4k tv for my next game when I get around to it). I'm sure on King and a shorter turn count, I'll find a game more suited to my taste (I avoided putting it on King to begin with because I didn't like Civ 5's unsubtle means of increasing the difficulty - e.g. enemy units have x amount more damage than you and production time cost x amount less for the other Civs rather than them being more cunning or efficient within the same 'rules' as players).

This all sounds a little negative - but I love Civ and I think this is potentially the best one. I will happily play this again in a few weeks time once I've cleared some other games and it's been patched / my computer is sorted. My advice: if you've played Civ before - especially Civ 5 - start on King or higher otherwise you might find play a little unsatisfying and victories a little cheap.