Civilization IV: Reinventing the entire bloody car

The latest iteration of Sid Meier's nation-building masterpiece Civilization dropped through the Crave letterbox earlier this week, dealing us a hefty blow in the midriff as we'd been camping out in a sleeping bag by the door, such was our anticipation for it. The reason for our abdominal discomfort quickly became clear as we tore off the packaging: the game's War and Peace-sized manual. Yes, it's just as complicated as ever.

This went a long way to easing our fanboy fears -- we'd heard whispers that, along with a total graphical overhaul, Sid and the boys at Firaxis had stripped out massive chunks of Civ's satisfyingly meaty gameplay. What, no pollution to clean up? we worried. In fact, while doing away with some of the duller management tasks, Civ addicts have been given lashings of new things to do -- religion makes its proper Civ debut, and Civ III's heroes have been upgraded to a variety of great citizens.

The real deal with Civ IV, though, is the graphics. Gone is the isometric map view of old, to be replaced with a luscious 3D world view, zoomable from the stratosphere (where the world turns in a manner reminiscent of 90s classic UFO: Enemy Unknown) to ground level, where each individual improvement built in a city is visible. At this level, every landscape feature, resource and military unit has its own noise -- waves lap against shores, pigs oink and mines clank and bang.

We haven't played it for more than a couple of evenings yet, so we can't pass any definitive judgement on Civilization IV, but it's certainly not outlandish to suggest that this is a huge achievement for Meier et al. In this day and age, to take a genre as clapped-out as the turn-based strategy and produce something that makes us sit up and stare is like making a blockbuster action film about bird-watching. In our sober, considered and entirely premature view, Civ IV is the reason PCs were invented. Expect a full review soon. -NH