Luke Plunkett from Kotaku posted a new article: His Civ6 Re-Review.
He reviewed Civ6 for the initial release, and now he went back to have a look at it again.
While he still likes Civ6, in his opinion it’s the worst of the main games (not counting expansions). He likes the happiness system, as well as controling archeologists and rockbands, but his main gripe is that the game gets in some way too board-gamey with the district system. He would like Civ to be more abstract, farer away from the numbers, to not micromanage the in his opinion to complicated system.
2 excerpts:
Civilisation VI takes a similar approach. It burdens the game with numbers, numbers everywhere, expressed in their rawest and least immersive form, and after seven years those numbers have buried many of the things I enjoy the most about Civilisation.
The defining aspect of Civilisation VI, the thing we will remember it for the most, is its district system. It’s a huge part of the game, based around the idea that after you build a city — which occupies a single one of the world’s tiles — you can then strategically expand it across the map, placing “districts” based on things like science or entertainment or the military, and these provide adjacency bonuses based on things like their proximity to other districts, or which natural resources they contain. It’s a system that is absolutely essential to getting the most out of your empire, and you can’t play Civilisation VI without at least trying to master it.
I love the way Civilisation VI — again, in contrast to a lot of other its other, less successful ideas — makes the game’s culture such a tangible force. Watching your borders spread like a virus in earlier games was one thing, but manually controlling archaeologists and artists and rock bands in the field is a blast. It’s these areas, where the game asks you to get down on the ground and shape your Civilisation directly, that it’s at its strongest. Where the numbers — which are always there, in every video game, I know — fade into the background.
You can read the whole article here and discuss it with us here.