Over the past weekend, Steam had a sale where Civilization 5 was on offer for seventeen dollars. At that price, you would have to have a very good reason not to pick that up. I tried Civilization 4 on my laptop a while ago, but I never really got into it. After hearing all sorts of great things about the game from when it released last year, I decided to tuck in and seen what it had to show.
I played a few games over the weekend and I have to say that Civ 5 is quite addicting. Once I got a hang of the mechanics and how everything gelled together, I was really digging the nation building aspects and avoiding combat whenever I could. The Barbarians can’t be avoided, but other Civilizations will parley with you peacefully if you’re not too aggressive (small City-States, on the other had, will hate you unanimously if you go around conquering them willy-nilly).
The first game I played like this was Rise of Nations, a real-time game (Civ is played in turns, if you didn’t know) that was as much about building a strong country as it was building a strong army. Civilization is a little bit more focused on the cultural aspects, but it made me miss the hours I spent playing RoN all the same.
Since so much of what I’m playing these days are shooters, Civilization 5 and Bastion were a great one-two punch combo of different genre hotness. It’s nice to play a game where the main objective isn’t “kill all the dudes” and it kind of makes me wish I had bought it earlier.
Did anyone else grab Civilization 5 during the sale? Have you been playing it since release? What do you think of it?