While action-hungry gamers will be all over the two biggest titles in recent months, GTA IV and MGS4, surely even they will be a little bit curious about how a classic strategy series will fare in its tentative first step on to the PS3, a console not known for going head to head with the bastion format of anally retentive gaming, the PC. We’ve kept an eye on the progress of Civilization’s translation over the last few months and on a professional level alone, we became increasingly curious. Bringing the Civilization series to the PS3 has something in common with the spate of big-budget, comic-book-hero movie adaptations we’ve seen in the last decade: Firaxis already has a cracking game and Sony’s got a great platform for it, so it’s all down to the directorial cut, and we’re glad to say Civilization Revolution smacks of an X-Men hit rather than Daredevil flop.

Firaxis had a tough task on its hands though, as this is no straight PC-toconsole port. Civilization IV is a turn-based strategy title that takes you from ancient times through several eras into the future, managing your burgeoning population as any one of 18 historically famous civilisations. Victory can be gained through scientific research, diplomacy or military might and along the way you constantly have to balance unit, building, research and resource production against each other in order to find the quickest means of achieving your goal. No one said the route to world domination was easy… and neither was boiling this incredibly deep and drawn-out strategy game down into a game more fitting for a console audience.

Firaxis has stripped out the obligatory micro-management of each city, leaving you with the simple choice of emphasising either food, production, gold, science or your own custom production options. The workers that performed manual labour on the map are now fully automated – you don’t even have to create them, they’re churned out according to the size of each city. Research takes less time, so progression from one era to the next is shorter and the whole game is generally much faster. What Firaxis has done is take away the management humdrum and the wasted turns waiting for something to happen, leaving something that even the ADD generation would be happy with: instead of playing with sliders and tapping the ‘end turn’ button for ten minutes, something exciting happens every turn. We’d barely settled the founding city of our fledgling Japanese empire when a barbarian tribe threatened to attack. Having dealt with these unevolved upstarts, we discovered and named a great river, founded another city, built The Colossus, encountered, traded and fought with a neighbouring civilisation before moving into the medieval period. All this within the first hour of play – which would have taken a whole working day of playtime in Civ IV on the PC. Everything has been fast-tracked, yet Civilization Revolution has lost very little depth for it. For certain, it’s not as sophisticatedlooking as its predecessors, but the brightly coloured units and large animated stereotypes that frequently grace your screen to inform, advise and threaten you have infinite more charm than the PC’s little dots, markers and text boxes.

It’s easy to pick up and play as well. Though Civ IV has a tutorial and a manual the size of a bible, it takes a little effort to warm up to it and it can be very intimidating at first. Not so with Civilization Revolution. You’re carefully spoon-fed events and information from your bespectacled advisor in the tutorial and it’s only once you’re let off the leash and you feel comfortable enough to delve into the menus that you realise its sheer depth and complexity. Any PS3 gamer would blanch at the volume of information contained within Civilization Revolution’s own encyclopedia, the Civilopedia, with its hundreds of entries complete with historical basis, photos and even video clips; but then we didn’t need to use it or even discover the in-game option, squirreled away in a drop-down menu, until halfway through our game.

There are few criticisms we can make about Civ Rev: one would be that diplomacy can be too black and white. If you’re not befriending another civilisation, then you’re their mortal enemy, whereas the PC version would give you a more tiered approach that allowed an amnesty on armies travelling through neutral or friendly lands, as well as lots of other diplomacy options. Aside from that, it feels like the series has gained something from the translation: the frequency with which events happen meant we struggled to put the controller down and stop ourselves from taking one more turn. It’s incredibly addictive, and while you might be left hanging around for your mate to finish his turn in multiplayer, you’ll find yourself quite willing to wait anyway. Whether you’re a Civ fan or you merely dabble with the odd strategy game, you should definitely give Civilization Revolution a turn.

Ben Biggs