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Here in America, we tend to be a little bit, say, forgetful about our past. It was a dirty, rude, egotistical period, and we tend to not want to be reminded of it, because it such an unbearable time that we still aren't sober enough to accept it. So, when a video game comes out that reminds the collective us about the atrocities of the time, and when it plays about as loose and difficult as its predecessor, you end up with an all together notorious experience. Civilization still ends up as a passable game, with a little charm, but you've got quite a bit of chaff to sort through.
Return to a less kind time after the jump.
For those who find the title confusing, Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization, is not an expansion of Civilization IV. This game is a remake of Sid Meier's Colonization, one of the tinny little games he created under MicroProse, which uses the Civ IV engine. The similarities between it and its hanger-on title is there happens to be land and you build cities, but the similarities end there. A lot of the elements from the ever-evolving Civ series are missing, replaced with things that seem downright foreign in this title, so much so that I confused some aspects with aspects from other games.
So, the point of Colonization is to start a colony in the New World, cause it to thrive, and then rebel against your home country and become an independent nation. This is done by landing, making friends with the native tribes and parleying with other colonists. And also managing some of the most convoluted resource options you'll ever see.
Each square of ground offers up 1-4 different resources, from food, wood, ore, silver, tea, sugar, cotton, or fur, in varying degrees. Your city thrives primarily on what's around it, and what it's sitting on. You can eventually upgrade the surrounding areas with pioneers, who build lodges and such, but you're pretty much stuck with whatever resources are under you when you put down spikes.
What do these resources do, you ask? (shrug) Food, wood and ore are the most valuable, because they sustain your population, increase your building time, and convert into tools. The rest of 'em only seem essential in trading with Europe, to acquire money which you need to buy new converts and ships. However, when it takes a minimum of two citizens and a absurd amount of time and/or resources to get a decent cashflow out of anything but silver, and with the overspecialization of most citizens, it's difficult to get the correct efficiency ratio.
Because managing this little towns is a difficult task. Most of your citizens will come from the homeland, so you have a constant influx of people, but you also have to feed them, an amount of 2 food a turn. So, if you don’t have dedicated farmers or fishers, you’ll have trouble keep your cities populated. You also have to find a way to generate enough goods to sell, enough liberty bells to provoke independence, and occasionally other materials...it gets toght to shuffle a decent size anything that does anything productive.
Beyond constantly creating supplies and maintaining cities, you also can explore the region to find...um...burial grounds and temples, which you loot for gold. The various natives you find will almost always agree to join you, sometimes going so far as to enter a defensive pact with you without any motivation. The closest tribes will occasionally just give you stuff, and you have happen to encroach upon their villages...they will hand them over, free of charge. They will sometimes ask payment to allow you to settle somewhere, but otherwise they are the most congenial natives ever...which, while possibly historically accurate in some cases, stings like hell considering what’s happening. A little more resistance would have been nice...although considering the issue, no more appealing.
At least if they fought back, you’d be prepared for the cave-in of an endgame. Declaring independence from your homeland causes your homeland to get a little pissy, if you will, and drop its entire army on you. Now, before you declare independence, you’re supposed to amass a resistence force, but even going fullsteam it’s difficult to match pace with your European successor. Since you don’t have anyone to fight in the New World, your own soldiers remain inexperienced, and purchasing assistance becomes impossibly costly. So, it’s an uphill climb, a sudden shift in focus that becomes infuriating when dealing with the flood of British or Spanish troops that are suddenly slamming against your barricades. It’s obnoxious that your game only counts as a win unless you have made preparations for problems you haven’t yet experienced.
All of these unfortunate implications and high bars of difficulty would be forgivable if the interface was at all intuitive, but it wears a bit thin. I played for an hour before I was even informed how to delegate my citizens within my city. The automation handles poorly, assigning people to tasks in a fairly uneffective way and not informing you of some big deal facts. If there’s a way to split resources, I wasn’t informed, and the hints are few and far between.
It’s not all horrible though. What’s good about it? It looks great, but so does Civ IV, and since they use the same engine, there’s not much credit we can give to the game itself. But it’s got something else: a challenge. It’s a difficult, messy, archaic kind of game, with a lot of interesting-looking options, but requires a great deal of effort and perspiration to even understand. It’s old school, and even still, even knowing how frustrating I find the game, I find myself still wanting to crack this game open.
I mean, it’s still a Sid Meier’s game; there’s still a lot of potential there. It’s just a lot of the little nitpicky things; a confusing UI, a complicated objective, a tinge of guilt, combined with the fact that they are reminding us of a superior title right there in the splash screen, and we end up with a unsatisfying “expansion.” Only tackle this if you’re looking a familiar challenge from times past.
Final Score: C
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