Civilization Revolution 2 Plus is a port of the mobile game to the PlayStation Vita. This is a 4X turn-based strategy game but is a spin-off of the full scale Civilization series, so you have to bear in mind that it will not provide the same full experience as the mainline PC games. There’s not story to the game, as expected, you select a nation and then you’re plonked into the game to build up your civilisation from nearly scratch.
This is an empire building game, and the goal is to become the greatest empire. First off, while there is a tutorial mode, it is horrible. It doesn’t do that much to explain how the game works, particularly the game flow. So you’re left even more confused afterwards, and it takes most of your first game to slowly figure things out. This is disappointing especially if you’ve never played a Civilization game before, as you’ll be hopelessly lost.
You start off with one city, and you create units. These units have different functions. Settlers can set up new cities, while Warriors can do battle, Spies can go into enemy cities to sabotage them and so on. Each city will have resource gathering, this is crucial because you use these various resources to build more units and do research. As you complete research, you grow as a society and gain access to better stuff. For example, completing the ironworks research gives you better attacking units, or completing Writing will improve the culture of your empire, allowing you to research faster.
The game takes place by turns, and each turn you can move each of your units. Moving your units will allow you to explore the map and uncover other cities. It’s up to you on how you want to approach those cities, you can attempt to attack and take over them, or you can agree to peace. However, how aggressive the other cities are towards your own will depend on the difficulty, as the higher difficulties will lead them to attack you despite your attempts at peace.
As you gather more and more units, and have more and more cities, it can become cumbersome to manage everything. This doesn’t help since there’s no easy way to quickly glance at the current situation. Even cycling through the cities can be a chore. You can use either touchscreen controls or physical buttons, and each has their advantages and disadvantages. Once the number of turns start to become higher and higher, it’s kind of boring sitting through them, especially since a lot of units can only move one square per turn, or there are some units that you don’t want to move.
There are four ways to win a game. Domination, where you end up capturing all the enemy capitals. Economic, where you collect enough coins. Cultural, where you discover enough wonders and have enough famous (or “great” as the game calls them) people in your population. And Science, where you are the first to send a spaceship to Alpha Centauri. Depending on how you play, each game can take around 3-4 hours, longer if you want to really think and strategize about it.
Even if you haven’t played the full-scale Civilization games, you can still tell that this is a simplified version. Once you get your head around how things work, you’ll come to realize that the game can actually be fairly shallow at times. It’s still fun, but you can definitely get a sense of how clunky it can be, and the limitations that it has. The graphics are also just passable, they’re not great but are enough for what you need it for.
How much play value the game has really depends on you. The core mode can feel similar in each playthrough, since there’s not much variation even when going for a different ending. The neat thing is at least the game doesn’t force you to end. You have to consciously achieve the winning condition, but once you’ve researched and unlocked all the technologies, there’s really not much point in continuing for much longer, particularly since the other cities like to declare war in their spare time.
To spice things up a little bit, there are also various Scenarios to play. This are interesting in that it has a certain setting, which influences the restrictions and rules that mode has. Maybe it’s set in the far future where people have travelled to another planet, so you cannot win by becoming the first in space anymore. Or it’s a war addicted world, where the focus is on domination, so the bonuses fast track towards building attacking units. These may sound interesting at first but since the maps has exactly the same aesthetic (even if the layouts are slightly different), it ends up feeling samey anyway.
Overall, Civilization Revolution 2 Plus is a good starting point for the series if you don’t want to get overwhelmed with the main line. Even with its terrible tutorial, it’s easy to pick up the game, especially on the lower difficulties where you can afford to make mistakes. It can get addictive in your first playthrough and particularly your second playthrough once you understand the game flow and game mechanics, but subsequent playthroughs run the risk of becoming stale as the game then doesn’t add anything much more to what it already has.
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