Forum Overview :: Civilization: Beyond Earth :: This game deserves more of a critical savaging than it has received.

[quote name="Hans Clastorp"]The big, fundamental problem is that it's basically unimaginative, which as far as I'm concerned is a critical failure for a sci fi world-building game. What really fucks me up is they had a great idea with the Exodus Gate endgame where you have to bring weak-ass human colonists through and use them to found vulnerable, worthless outposts. This adds a lot to the endgame, which has always needed something. In my last playthrough, by the time I built the gate all the terrain on the map had been claimed, so I was forced to raze the cities of my neighbour to make room to setting my hyoomans. The hyoomans are vulnerable, which theoretically sets up an interesting trade-off of needing to make war while also needing to protect weak territory on the fringes of your empire. Unfortunately they undercut this idea by making it by far the most difficult victory, and also the fact that the AIs are so passive that even on the hardest difficulty they really don't seem to pay any mind as you cruise to an inevitable win 20 turns out. If they had just taken that idea, scrapped the other victories, and retooled the rest of the game around this, I think it would have been a really cool and effective twist on the concept. There would still be a lot of other problems, such as: - The aliens are boring. There are only 5 or so different alien units, and they are the same on every biome. (Are there different biomes? One seems more purpley, another sort of orangey...). They have absolutely no impact on the game beyond the early expansion phase. In the press leadup Firaxis made a big hairy deal about how the aliens Aren't Just Barbarians!! But this is basically complete bullshit. Supposedly they will be less aggressive towards you if you leave them alone, but I never found this to be the case or make any material difference to anything. Even if you choose the Harmony route you can't do anything except kill them. - The map is really really ugly. The muted colour scheme in general is terrible. It's almost impossible to see miasma on forest tiles. The different biomes (if there are different biomes) are almost identical, with idential resource types. - Really uninspired colony types, whose leaders endlessly repeat the same line every time they talk to you. They fucking suck and I hate them all. I try to play as the most annoying ones (African Union, Polystralia) so I don't have to look at their shitty faces. Maybe it's because I'm currently reading Red Mars, which is a really great and (as far as I can tell) thoroughly researched depiction of the establishment of a planetary colony. The arguments around terraforming, the technology (even though it's not very far removed from present day), the various interests in play, all have a ton of character. The rudimentary attempts at adding character to the world of C:BE are extremely abstract and vague. Oh, I built a Xeno Sanctuary? Great. What's that? Who gives a shit? There's nothing grasp onto in terms of telling yourself an interesting story about your colony's development (which, really, is a huge part of my enjoyment of civ games). Anyway, my point is this: Civilization: Beyond Earth is an utterly conservative, soulless reiteration of a superior game, with only nominal and failed attempts to address the well-known shortcomings of its predecessor. NEGATIVE![/quote]