Intro:

Years after you’ve launched your first satellite into space your people have taken to the stars, in search of new hope for humankind among the stars.  You are one of the leaders send into space to find a habitable planet, in order to do so you are sponsored by a corporation, a cooperative, a union etc. They all have different outlooks into how the world works and so you must choose carefully your sponsors before you set for the stars.

Scale:

• Great
• Good
• Decent
• Not bad
• Bad
• Nope

Game:

• Graphic: Good
• Sound: Good
• Animation: Good
• AI: Bad
• Gameplay: Good
• Modding: Decent

Details:

• Graphics are good, of course there is always room for improvement especially since it doesn’t look all the different from previous Civilization titles that I’ve reviewed. Although that being said, it does have this added flavor of Affinity which we will delve a bit more in Gameplay and of course the whole sci-fi feeling to it.
  
  
• Sound is good, but like previous titles has its hiccups.  Sadly it’s to be expected when the level of change in other aspects it’s not that huge. Of course it’s not to say it’s bad or any of the sort, but it’s good enough that it’s not annoying.
• Animations are good, albeit not great, that being said it does bring “new” explosions and somewhat different textures. Some places could’ve used more love than others, of course that can be said even more about the AI and few changes it has to it. Now the feature of changing the clothes of leaders compared to their Affinity was a nice move, which I’ve been waiting for in other previous titles to happen.  That being said the changes are so minimal you won’t even notice them if you talk with the leaders a lot.
• AI sadly is still a mess and probably will still be a mess, even with the Rising Tide update.  They didn’t do much in terms of improving the AI, so you will go to war or peace in the most ridiculous of moments for the most mind boggling reasons.
• Gameplay is of course good since at first glance it does look just like a reskin of the previous title.  It does add its own small flavors, such as being able to control if the trade routes will keep doing the same route or not by ticking it on and off.  Affinity is added, which changes not only the look of your troops but also their stats and what they are specialized in.  With the Rising Tide update there was a nice change which I was eagerly expecting which was to be able to make hybrids of the Affinity; albeit not all troops were able to be hybrids, to my sad discovery.  Affinity was a newly added feature that was divided into 3 categories later on having +3 sub categories (for the hybrids) in Rising Tide. Those being Harmony (alien and human DNA), Supremacy (robot and human DNA) and Purity (enhanced human DNA, purely human).  Another cool feature was cities on water, which I hoped for before the game came out, which comes with being able to ram units if you are moving the city on that tile.
• Modding is decent mostly because I haven’t bothered to delve too much into it, from what I can see it does have some mods.  Whether they are good or bad I can’t say for certain so I will rate it decent for now until I get time to do more research on it.

Conclusion:

The game is not bad, but it could’ve been a whole lot better.  Unfortunately I would not recommend buying it for full price.  Wait for a sale and see if you can get Rising Tide in there as well.  With that out of the way, if you are looking for a more sci-fi, less religion kind of game it’s worth the try.  It’s not a bad game but Civilization V isn’t good either without it’s expansions and countless DLC milking.   Keep in mind this comes from someone who was looking forward to this game and hoping not to fail completely, which it kind of did, in my honest opinion and I am sad that I spent so much.  I would still recommend it but only if you get it on sale – and I do mean sale!  I don’t mean 10-30% I mean 75%!   The game had/has potential if they are willing to fix it’s problems and do it better.  If they decide to pick up the mantle and give it a full overhaul, I might change my outlook on the sale.