RevieWednesday: Civilization V (With Gods and Kings and Brave New World expansion packs+DLC)

Civilization V is a turn based strategy game that allows you to pick a nation (with their own unique abilities and units) or play a scenario based off a historical event. The nations and their respective leaders range from George Washington (America) to Shaka (Zulu). You start at 4000 BC with a warrior and a settler. You research technologies, improve resources (both luxury [i.e. Silk]and strategic [i.e. Iron]), collect culture to adopt Social Policies, and conduct diplomatic relations with other civ's and waging war. You can win by achieving military, scientific, time, culture, and diplomatic victories. Plus the amount of mods available, if you get bored of the general gameplay.

POSITIVES

The gameplay is tight, it sounds great, its graphically great, its roster of civilizations is good, and increases with DLC and expansion packs. Its addictive as all hell, its one the game I have on steam that has 550+ hours sinked in. It even includes an ingame "civilopedia" that contains historical information for buildings, civilizations, units, wonders, and resources. This is one good strategy game.

NEGATIVES

Civilization V's map is based on hexagonal cells for spaces, which is perfectly fine, but the game is made to have to one unit per cell (no two military units or no two civilian units, but one cilivian and military unit per cell though). Building cities increases the costs of research and social policies, meaning that wide empires are without slowing your progress, meaning you would potentially fall behind other nations. Without any of the expansion packs, the vanilla original game gets pretty boring after a while, usually well into the industrial era. This may or may not be a problem unique to me, but apparently, if you have too many mods installed, your game may crash before barely getting to the title screen. So far, my fix was to reset my computer (which needed to be cleaned out anyway).

VERDICT: 4.7 out of 5 Stars

"Amazing game, but held back by nitpicky problems and post release player retention problems."