You'd think Sid Meier's Civilization--a game built on the same successful foundations for 34 years now--would be one of the most dependable video game series on Earth. The one game you could always count on to get it right, every time. And yet, here we are.
You've probably read a bunch of Civilization VII reviews by now. You've maybe been assaulted by Angry Thumbnail Guys on YouTube's front page over the last week. You may even have seen the news articles about the game’s Steam page being flooded with negative feedback. Whatever you've seen or heard, the word on the street is that a lot of people think this is a bad video game!
And I mean, it is. But it's also more complicated than that.
Civilization VII isn't a bad video game in the way that, say, Milennia was. There's a bedrock here making it impossible for Civ to ever suck in the truest sense of the word. It's a cliche, and as much a hallmark of the turn-based genre's psychological manipulations as anything to do with Civ itself, but it's also true: Civilization VII has, if nothing else, still got that "one more turn" thing going on. Despite everything I'm about to say, I have played this game almost non-stop for the past week, even when I haven't had to.
It is, however, "bad" in the sense that since 1991 a number of Civilization games vastly superior to this one have been released, which still look and play great. Civ VII gives us very little reason to give them up for the newest entry in the series, which could and should have improved things, but has instead regressed in many ways and outright confounds in others.
Civ VII is "bad" because I was continually frustrated while playing it, was rarely kept motivated or interested for long sessions, and often ran into bizarre, uncharacteristic bugs and oversights. Despite playing it all week I've rarely found myself enjoying my time with it, and have indeed found more comfort this month in a 30 year-old spinoff than in playing this brand new edition.
But I don't think it's a bad video game. I just think it's a rushed, disorganised mess, more a victim of weird management decisions and AAA release pressures than anything wrong with Civ's patented take on the 4X genre itself.
There's a lot wrong with Civilization VII. Some of it is clear in a vacuum; other issues are only visible--but perhaps more pressing as a result--if you're a long-time fan of the series. Whether you've been with Civ from the onset or just Civ VI, though, the end result is the same: almost every aspect of the experience has stagnated or gone backwards here, even from Civilization VI, which I thought was itself a misfire.
Let's start with diplomacy. Civilization is a series that has lived and, more recently, died with its diplomacy. Even as far back as the first game, a combination of character art, writing and personality has made your allies and enemies feel alive. I can't understate how important this was to placing your own civilization and efforts into context. For most of this series' history it felt like you were playing against rivals, not just the AI.
Civilization VII has reduced diplomacy to an endless series of transactional nuisances. A new diplomacy system has commoditised everything in the game, while at the same time removing the way Civs would often pop in just to say hi, exclaim at your progress or just threaten you, which makes the entire experience feel so much lonelier than previously. I never felt like I was one part of a wider human race in this game, more like one player tending to their little zen garden while everyone else tended theirs.
If you've seen any of the negative feedback for this game, you've probably seen people blaming "bad UI" for many of Civ VII's woes, and yes, the interface sucks, but "bad UI" has also become an unfortunate catch-all criticism for some problems that run deeper than some grey boxes. Civ VII's UI doesn't tell you things you need to know, continually tells you things you don't need to know, is slow and glitchy, is incapable of differentiating between what's a bother and what's important and is just generally a massive disappointment, functionally and visually, from its predecessors.
It's clear something has gone very wrong during the game's development. There are now multiple examples, both from early demos in 2024 and hidden in the final game's code, of Civ VII once having an almost entirely different interface. For that aspect of the game to have been overhauled so close to release sure would explain why things look so bland and rushed--one of my earliest notes from playing this was "looks like an iPad version of Civ V"--and why the interface was the first thing Firaxis have said they'd be fixing, because what if they're not really fixing it at all, but just...finishing it.
Another thing that is bad, but also not bad: the game's art. Not its characters or map, both of which are gorgeous, but the game's set-dressing, the illustrations that adorn its faction screens and key moments. These appear, to put it gently, rushed, to the point where some civs like the French feature near-complete illustrations depicting their national character, while others, like America, look like they were done on a lunchbreak.
The art manages to disappoint when it's not even there. In 1991's Civilization, for example, completing the scientific victory path earned you a lengthy cutscene depicting your people's journey through the stars. In 2025's Civilization VII, when I won the same victory with America, I got a two-line speech from actress Gwendoline Christie (who is admittedly excellent here overall) and an animated rendition of the same 18th-century artwork used at the faction select screen.
My main issue with Civilization VII is that, whether it was rushed or not, it doesn't know what it is. Civilization V had a clear direction. Civ VI did as well, even if I didn't end up liking it. Civilization VII feels like a game where it tries some stuff, cuts some other stuff then thinks about some other tweaks as well, but little of it feels like it's in the service of making the series better.
It's as though Civilization, the Godfather of the genre, looked at Humankind copying Civ and decided for some reason--Humankind wasn't great!--to copy Humankind in return. Civilization VII features Humankind's mid-game civ-switching, for example, which is ruinous, robbing the game of any sense of continuity or character. It has Humankind's meditative flow, where slow-moving units are queued up while they crawl across the map and city growth is tended to on a tile-by-tile basis, which is streamlining and relaxing to a point, but also saps Civilization of much of its essential busywork. It even has Humankind's town system, only here, for reasons listed above, it fails to properly explain it.
Ever since making the leap to a hexagonal map with Civilization V, and drawing in more and more board game influences in its wake, this is a series that has lost touch with its roots. With each successive game and expansion over the past 15 years Civ has been looking increasingly at stuff like numbers, optimisation and metas and lost sight of what made the series so special in the first place. The numbers in Civ were never the point, they just ran under the hood. The point was getting to see and play with the stuff they were in service of: that feeling of taking a tribe out of the literal darkness and into space, building cool stuff along the way and dealing with rivals who felt like rivals.
Now, with so much of the Civ experience devoted to the board game-like optimisation of numbers and combos, and with so much of its busywork streamlined--worker units, one of my favourite pastimes, are gone entirely from Civ VII--it barely even feels like Civ anymore. If you'd told me Civ VII was a spinoff of the series, or a competitor's attempt at cloning it, I would 100% have believed you.
It's been a huge bummer writing this much negative stuff about a new Civilization game, so in the interests of saying something nice, I'll say that perhaps the game's biggest swing for the fences--the new era system--has at least partly paid off. By splitting the game into three distinct ages (Ancient, Exploration and Modern), each with a different scope and objectives, Civ VII games feel expertly-paced during their opening few hours. The Age of Exploration in particular is fantastic, as it broadens the game world itself, increasing the size of the map and the number of leaders on the board, helping to bring a real sense of weight to this particular moment in history.
I can't help being this negative, though, because nearly everything else new or changed here is for the worse. Of course Civ VII has that "one more turn" pull here, a basic sense of perpetual motion brought on by the progression of tech and the expansion of borders, because that's a psychological plot every Civ game can bring to bear. But I can get the same thing from other Civs already, without any of Civ VII's multiple missteps bogging the experience down.
It's sobering, in kinda the same way we've seen with Call of Duty in recent years, that such a seeming home run can be botched in today's AAA release environment. This game had all the time in the world to come out, yet here it is, clearly rushed and busted and unfinished and getting the reception such a release deserves. During my repeated downtime with this game, I couldn't help but wonder, If a new Civilization game can stumble and trip out of the gates like this, what hope do so many other legacy series have in the same environment?
Indeed the only optimism I can salvage here is that, like I've said, while there are some strategic missteps, many of Civ VII's other issues don't necessarily make it a bad video game. It's just not finished. And if we went nine years between Civs last time around, Firaxis have plenty of time to at least try and tie a bow on this one.
