The first part of this review isn't actually about the game, it is about corporate greed. I have been in games long enough to remember a time where games were mostly being made by people passionate about games, trying to maximize value for the player. The overexpansion of the games industry during the pandemic has led to there not being many passionate development studios left, if any. Civilization VII adds Firaxis to the studios that have gone over to the dark side. Corporate greed shows up in 3 major points: Abandoning the PC as a standard platform for the Civilization series in order to chase console sales, aggressive monetization, and lack of quality control. Thus a month after release, Civ 7 has "mixed" Steam reviews, with less than half of them positive. This isn't a few review trolls, but the opinions of 27,500 players, which is now more than the game's Steam concurrent user peaks on a weekday. Firaxis certainly tried to maximize shareholder value instead of maximizing value of the players, but even without knowing console sales I have my doubt that this was a business success. I think it is more likely that you'll have a financial success if you concentrate on making a great game, while concentrating on making money is rarely a winner.

Between the redesign for console controller and the bugs, the user interface of Civ 7 is now just plain bad. The user interfaces of the two big 4X history games of last year, Millennia and Ara: History Untold, have their peculiarities, and there were certainly complaints. Nobody would have guessed that Civilization VII manages to do worse here. The series that usually *sets* industry standards is now not even conforming to the more basic ones of them. All of the mods I am currently running are just there to fill in the blanks, give me the information that the game itself refuses to tell me. I started my review with corporate greed, because if the bugs weren't there, and if the UI wasn't so bad, people would have been less shocked when Firaxis asked them to shell over another 30 bucks for the first DLC just 4 weeks after advance access release. Creating monetizable content instead of fixing rather obvious shortcomings is just a very bad look, regardless of whether you believe that content had been deliberately removed to be sold back to you, or whether it had been created in those 4 weeks.

Having said all that, I like Civilization VII more than I liked the predecessor. I have played all the games in the series when they were released, including outliers like Colonization or Alpha Centauri. Civ 6 to me felt tired, as if all the graphical improvements, the bells and whistles, were finally unable to make me forget that this was a game that simply wasn't fun to play to the end. Civ 7 is still not fun to play to the end, but the era resets *do* help, and it is visible how a better balancing of legacy paths and victory conditions could actually turn this into a game I would want to play until the end. And Civ 7 is more satisfying to stop playing at the end of an era, rather than stopping to play Civ 6 at some vague point where the fun has run out. I play antiquity twice as often as I play the explorations age, and that twice as often as modernity. But the fundamental feature of era resets is very, very welcome, and for example the scouting at the start of the exploration age is nearly as much fun as at the start of the overall game.

200 hours of Civilization VII played means I am well past my usual 1 dollar per hour quality yardstick, and that although I upgraded to the $130 founder's edition. I am having fun with Civilization VII. I am cursing about the shitty interface *while* having fun, but I am having fun. Paying $130 is me succumbing to the realization that I won't get a complete Civilization experience for just $70. We will see about the DLCs of next year, but this year's DLCs I consider to be the necessary stuff, the stuff that was in the game and then got cut out to be resold later. Civilization VII isn't going to be complete until they added the 4th age, and traces of that atomic age are already in the game files. And maybe that fixes the age of modernity, where the current victory conditions feel somewhat artificial, probably because in the final game they will just be regular legacy paths, not victory conditions.

Civilization VII is not a finished game, but it is a game with a good bone structure. Having played a lot, I tried out a variety of different things. The experience tends to be similar: There is a designed way to play this game, and if you deviate from it, things tend to go wrong. Civilization VII is not yet a robust game. This is why I am thinking of giving it some more time: The long-term replayability is suffering when you try an unusual strategy and either that is an absolutely unexpected success that instantly wins the game, or some unexpected consequence totally ruins the game. Also, "I tried something fun, and then they nerfed it", isn't a great player experience either, it reminds me too much of my MMORPG days. Civ 7 is fixable, and as Firaxis only had two major brands, Civ and XCOM, and they abandoned XCOM, so they can't afford not to fix this one, eventually. At the point where it is, I consider Civ 7 better than Ara, but worse than Millennia today. But Millennia's ugliness problem can't be so easily fixed, and Firaxis has deeper pockets, so there is a good chance that next year, Civ 7 will be the best game.

I understand that for many people this will not be enough. Not everybody wants to pay $130+ and wait a year to get all the parts together that finally will make a good Civilization VII. If you paid $70 and expected a good game now, you only got a flawed version instead, and are understandably angry. There is fun to be had in the current version of Civ 7, but only if you are willing to cope with some shit that you shouldn't have to cope with. So this is certainly not a general recommendation from me. My general recommendation would be to check back in next year.