Civilization revolution is the first civilization game which has been developed exclusively for consoles. The last time a Civilization game showed up on console was way back in the original PlayStation. The Gamespot team recently got a hands on the PS3 version of the game. They chose Abraham Lincoln to lead a small village into a massive modern day metropolis replete with a team of progressive thinkers and armed with ballistic missiles. The first thing veterans of the old Civilization games would notice is that the game is so much faster compared to its predecessors.
The game has been specifically streamlined and designed for the consoles and it shows. You will need to maintain a heady balance of science, population growth, production and military engagements to survive. The turns in the game is pretty fast as you get automatically switched to a new city which is idle and the military units move on their own provided the paths are queued. The game thrives on the thrill of completing massive monuments such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon just two turns before your enemy or when your dreary medieval knights gets upgraded to slick modern Sherman tanks. The game’s speed means that you can finish a campaign in as little as three hours. The ultimate aim is to garner 20,000 gold coins or build the World Bank which assures an economic victory or entice 20 eminent people from history to your country which gives a cultural victory or construct multiple monuments to gain a different type of cultural victory. However, the swiftest and most satisfying one is to decimate all your foes from the face of the Earth and earn a domination victory.
The game’s design is such that it throws up an interesting twist of irony, like you could be at peace with a warlord like Genghis Khan but wage a war against Gandhi’s Indians. By building libraries you can quickly reach the modern age and go onto build more powerful and deadly war machines. As you go on researching mathematics, advanced flight and literacy you get access to powerful technology like the flying fortresses. As you grow, your government would change from authoritarian despotism to democracy. This means that the people’s power reigns supreme and you cannot just go to war as you please. No matter how much you respect democracy, you didn’t build the flying fortress just to admire it from distance. You have to revert back to despotism by claiming emancipation from the people. This can be one turbulent switch as the people will start revolting and usually results in anarchy. Once you convert back to despotism you gain free rights to carry on military endeavors. If you have paced your research well enough, your steel tanks would be up against some medieval horsemen and archers. After you have dispatched the enemy to oblivion the next step is to research nuclear power and atomic theory. Once you are done with the research you get the chance to decimate and permanently erase a city from the pages of history
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