Review: Sid Meier’s Civilization VII (Switch) – An Incredible Game That’s Not Quite Ready – Nintendo Life

GuestGuestLogin | Sign UpNintendo LifeGuestLogin or Sign UpSid Meier’s Civilization VIISwitch2025 N/AGame RatingUser Ratings: 2Our Review: Scroll DownShort of CivilliantVersion Reviewed: North AmericanMost games with numbered sequels tend to iterate and grow on their previous instalments. After all, you don’t want to alienate your audience by upending key systems and creating a substantially different experience from what they’re used to, it just makes sound economic sense. Change things just enough so that it rides that line between familiarity and shininess.Firaxis apparently missed this particular industry-wide memo, and thus the Civilization series will happily buck its own trends and well-established ideas in order to deliver something fresh every single time, and that is no less the case with Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, which we’ll be calling ‘Civ 7’ for the sake of our keyboard.Let’s be clear, it sticks to the same broad ideas as ever, but tried and trusted mechanics have gone out the window; not because they didn’t work, but because, hey, it’s time to try something different.As with every game prior, Civ 7 has you take on the role of a real-life world leader – each with their own unique bonuses and quirks – looking to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate, and coining the ‘4X’ genre presumably named by people with first-letter blindness. In Civ 7 you’re going to need to try and achieve one (or realistically, more than one) of four goals before your opponents, and those four ‘E’s we mentioned earlier are the way to do it.Simple, right? No, not right. The reality of the game is that there are a staggering number of ways to achieve your chosen goals, each with the potential to be as nuanced and calculated as a well-played game of chess. Or you could go full militaristic and nuke everyone else, declaring yourself the victor by default. However, it’ll be a while before you’ll be able to do so, at least with actual nuclear warheads, because Civ 7 changes the previous progression system by introducing three Ages of humanity.You’ll start in Antiquity, which has you start at the literal birth of your new civilisation with nary but a settler to start your very first city. You’ll need to research advanced human technology such as pottery and what to do with animals and systematically work your way through all the major technological advancements of our species. And there’s not much in the way of shortcuts for this, unlike the previous entry in the series. You’re going to have to work for each and every one of these the old-fashioned way, or steal them from your neighbours.Yes, diplomacy has had potentially the biggest overhaul this time around, mostly requiring you to use the new Influence points to better or intentionally worsen your relationship with the other blossoming nations. You can also actually see your leader as well during these moments, which is a nice touch.A personal favourite addition to this system is the ability to ‘reject’ a denouncement from a rival, spending hard-earned Influence points to stop a leader from driving a wedge between your people. It’s a small addition, but one that makes a formal war feel more tied to public opinion than simply two leaders having beef. Whether that’s more true-to-life or not is debatable.Following the Antiquity Age is the Exploration Age, and the way this change works is a little strange, but oddly refreshing. Your cities and towns remain the same, but you may have some of your units trimmed if you don’t have enough Commanders (oh, we’ll get onto them, don’t you worry) or settlements to house them properly.It’s not entirely clear how the system works in its entirety, but the units you do keep will be upgraded to Age-appropriate examples. We’re still absolutely gutted that our Purabhettarahs were ‘upgraded’ to mere horses with blokes in the saddle, but apparently war elephants aren’t cool enough to survive into 400CE.This transition almost feels like a ‘New Game Plus’ moment, where you’re sort of starting anew, sort of not. It helps to bookend each third of the game, and stops one player from potentially blasting a satellite into orbit whilst another is just working out how to make boats not sink. It also gives us the sense we’ve completed a game without having to sacrifice an entire weekend only for Harriet Tubman to go to war with us yet again, distracting King Xerxes from his honest scientific aims.But the Exploration Age is all about just that – boats that don’t sink. You’ll be stretching out beyond the confines of your original landmass into the wide unknown, founding distant new settlements and finding exotic resources. In our first run, we didn’t even really check the settings properly due to a sudden lapse in competence and assumed that there were four civilisations on the planet, including our own. Reaching not only another entire continent but two new leaders was honestly kind of magical.This is hardly a new feature, and we ourselves have already had this happen in previous games, but that moment of barely being able to cross a chunk of deep ocean only to be greeted by two new allies/enemies took us aback more than we expected, and more than it logically should. A really lovely experience.After that is the Modern Age, where the guns and the tanks roam free. You’ll be digging up relics from the past, trying to win the space race, developing weapons of mass destruction, the whole megillah. Tensions are also higher than ever, forcing even the likes of Confucius into building up armies of dive bombers because Catherine the Great suddenly lost all affection for him.In fact, let’s talk about combat for a moment. It is almost certainly possible to play an entirely pacifist game should you be skilled enough, but a player who doesn’t at least build a defensive force is a fool indeed. Alliances can sour quickly if you make the wrong move or don’t have the right number of influence points to make right what’s wrong and, as such, war – if not inevitable – is at least bloody likely.Previous games in the series had you control each unit individually, and that’s sort of the same case here, except it’s also sort of not, thanks to the unrivalled blessing of Commanders. Commanders can ‘carry’ up to four units (or six, with a promotion) and march them across the land faster and much more effectively than they could on their own. They can’t fight themselves though, they’re purely a support unit.The end result is that combat and wars are substantially easier to manage and control than in previous games. You’re going to want to make use of them though, as individual units can’t be promoted as before, only Commanders. Their promotion tree can make otherwise weak units far more potent than they have the right to be, guided as they are by a competent admiral/captain/head honcho. It’s a shame we can’t name them, as mowing down Benjamin Franklin’s Roman legion under the banner of the great commander Gromit would be a real point in the game’s favour.And no, that wasn’t a mistake, we did say Benjamin Franklin’s Roman legion because leaders are no longer tied to their real-life civilisations. You can mix and match as merrily as you like, or you can keep things clean and historically accurate if you prefer, you’d be missing out though, as certain combinations can produce really beneficial results, or you can pick a somewhat worse combination if you’re looking for a really different run. You can even jump to the later two ages at the very start of a game if you like, skipping all that pesky need to research what rocks are good for. It’s all options, and options are good.Unfortunately, the Switch version has slightly fewer options when it comes to setting up a game. Map sizes are limited to ‘Tiny’ and ‘Small’, no doubt due to hardware limitations, but considering Civ 6 managed far, far larger map sizes, it’s disappointing that they’re not even an option here.At least there are efforts to allow crossplay for online games though, right? Right. Unfortunately, our attempts to join an online game were hampered by the fact that other platforms have already had a patch, meaning that the versions of the lobbies we tried to join were incompatible about 95% of the time. Quite irritating.We were able to find an appropriate game eventually, though the game immediately crashed upon loading the map. Eventually, we did get a successful match going, but getting there wasn’t so much a headache as a full-blown migraine. It’s a real shame, too, as playing against real people is a much more interesting experience by default.You’re likely expecting us to now detail how unstable the game is on Nintendo’s hybrid, but in all honesty, it was more reliable than we expected. We had a single crash mid-game in our 30-40 hours playing, although we did happen upon several other crashes at less critical moments, such as loading a saved game or linking a 2K account.More than this, we’re sad to report that Civilization VII doesn’t really feel as finished as it should. We’ve encountered numerous bugs with duplicate ghosts of units long past just standing on a tile they were once on, music constantly stuttering and cutting out, controls occasionally misbehaving causing us to perform actions we didn’t want to perform, constant reminders that new resources are available to allocate when there absolutely are not any new resources at all, general UI weirdness, the list goes on. None of these are strictly game-breaking, but it’s not what anyone wants to see.The Civlopedia should also be a slam-dunk in the game’s favour, an in-game resource that tells you how everything works and even provides historical information about nigh-on everything within it, but it’s almost impossible to navigate. Categories seem arbitrary at best, and you can’t even reach the search box without using the touch screen, and even if you do manage to type something in, the actual searching appears to do nothing.And it could be so useful. This series isn’t renowned for its simplicity; there are countless systems and resources to keep track of and understand, which is wonderful in its own right, but it needs to be properly explained to the player, which the Civlopedia could do so easily. There are tutorials for first-time players, but certain aspects are overexplained, and others glossed over.The Minus button is a dedicated ‘2K Account’ button, allowing you to see who’s online as well as the info of anyone you’re currently playing with. A sensible feature, but one that absolutely doesn’t need to have a dedicated button instead of simply an entry in the pause menu. If this was used to jump to the dedicated Civlopedia page of what you’re highlighting instead, it would be invaluable. As it is, it’s just a confusing bundle of pages.Yet despite all these valid criticisms, we could barely pull ourselves away from it. The UI may be wonky in places, but on Switch it’s much cleaner and better scaled than Civ 6’s ballooned offering, particularly when docked. Gwendoline Christie’s narration is a delight, the moment-to-moment gameplay and the thrill of a plan coming to fruition is deliciously rewarding, and the bitter taste of defeat successfully makes you loathe the leader that caused it rather than the game itself, which is a very difficult thing to get right.It’s also brimming with wonderful little details, like a quote calling back to one of Eddie Izzard’s most beloved stand-up routines about flags, a memento that is a real-life stone tablet and one of the earliest examples of human writing complaining about the quality of shipment of copper, a similarly real stone with ‘catch’ engraved upon it, it’s overwhelming fun to anyone with a love of history/prehistory/British standup.Performance on Switch is a bit mixed. Much like its predecessor, the uncapped frame rate will perform buttery smooth when zoomed right in, reaching up to the maximum of 60, but it’s a fool’s dream to believe you’ll get this during normal gameplay. Generally you’re going to expect between 20 and 30 frames a second, varying quite dramatically. Due to the game’s turn-based nature this isn’t a dealbreaker by any means, and aside from a few wonky models, the game manages to look rather nice, with plenty of detail when zoomed right out.There’s an outstanding game in Sid Meier’s Civilization VII just waiting to burst free, but it’s trapped under a wet, slimy coating of bugs and a mostly-finished interface. What we have on Switch is a phenomenal game that could be one of the absolute finest in its genre, a true monolith of game design and a delight for all fans of turn-based shenanigans, but its laundry list of launch-day bugs and issues pulls it from the peak it could have reached. It’s great as it stands, but with more development time could have been utterly seminal.Great 8/10Review copy provided by NintendoHow we review productsScoring PolicyRelated ProductsPlease note that some external links on this page are affiliate links, which means if you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.About Alex OlneyAlex has been churning out videos on our YouTube channel for blinkin’ ages now. He labels everyone who passes by as a ‘Lovely Person’, and rightly so.Comments 22Man, I’m super stocked to hear that people getting this on Switch will still have a great experience. I was really worried when it looked like no Switch review copies had been sent out!This is such a great type of game to have “on the go”, ready for long waits and long commutes. It’s really the type of game that’s known for making time disappear, and having it with you when time normally slows to a crawl is a real game changer.Thanks for the review, fingers crossed that the technical issues will be fixed sooner rather than later (luckily we know that they’re already working on that and more) – even more so after reading this I’m definitely interested in giving it a try myself at some point although I’m also waiting to see if there will be any improvements exclusive to Switch 2 and how they’ll implement them!those issues sound pretty solvable tbh. good achievement to have it presentable on the old Switch.I am torn between getting it on Switch or PS5? Never played them before.I’m really enjoying it so far, bearing in mind my expectations arent for this to be perfect at launch. Anyone wanting something more than what it is now will probably be guaranteed to find that game after patches and an expansion or 2. Knowing Civ, there will be alot of life in this game for years to comeThis seems like another case of portability vs storage space, and maybe performance depending on what else you could play it on. For me it’s switch vs Xbox. The last game ran much better in the X, this one probably isn’t as big of a difference from the sounds of it but the big thing for me is I don’t have as much storage on the switch for all the dlc and patches this will get and the switch won’t allow you to play on larger map types. I could maybe pick up the base game on a sale for switch down the road for the portable aspect but first I’ll go with the X and even then only when it gets more dlc to bolster it.How many civs can be active in one game? I always played on small maps anyway, but with like 8 civs or so. Bigger maps feel like it takes forever to get anywhereGiven that I expected the performance on Switch to be a complete train wreck at launch, the fact that it’s only a fender bender is truly amazing! I’ll probably break down and buy it sooner rather than later!Civilisation is one of the most addictive games ever made. It’s one of those games you put on for a quick game and end up doing an all nighter on.Great to see it’s still going strong and yes, I will be picking this one up when it drops in price and has been patched.Removed – inappropriateLove this on switch. Worth the money. Hopefully we can have bigger Maps on switch 2, its only small or tiny on switch.. but a ton of fun 😊Glad to hear it’s a good experience on Switch. Now the real question is should I buy it now or wait for the possible Switch 2 edition?I’ve never played a Civilization game, but I would have been tempted to pick this up if not for the predictable issues and likelihood of a crapton of paid DLC releasing later on.I might hold out for a DRM-free PC version, or a complete edition on the Switch 2.@RenanKJ It’s obvious that would be better to wait. More RAM and processing power change everything.good to read that it is quite o, was fearing disaster after no review was appearing.. propbably will get this in time, civ 6 was discounted quite often (and haven’t played it quite enough… so i don’t mind waiting for a switch 2 version/patch with mouse -con controlIt’s almost as if they’ve rushed it out to sell to Switch 1 owners, and will release a more definitive Switch 2 version somewhere down the line.@Tetsuro Kinda depends if the game will actually be able to use the extra hardware through BC, though. A Switch 2 edition of the game would be the ideal scenario.@RenanKJ It will, definitely. This is held back by Nintendo Switch and its poor RAM. It’s a PC game optimized for far much higher specs. I ti will benefit greatly from the Nintendo Switch 2 hardware.I’ll definitely buy the gold edition in a few years once the bugs have been ironed out and missing features addedPlaying on PC and I’m loving it. Got the early release and have racked up many, many hours on it already. Looking forward to what’s to come!VI didn’t exactly run well on Switch either, and seeing how it STILL has problems, I don’t expect them to fix much of VII’s problems on here either.Critics reviews rank it the worst mainline Civ yet.I found an article, ranking them all by MetaCritic score, and it ended up 10th-best in the entire series including spinoffs.I’ve also read the top Steam users reviews, and oof, their complaints make a lot of sense to me.Most games with numbered sequels tend to iterate and grow on their previous instalments. Change things just enough so that it rides that line between familiarity and shininess.Firaxis apparently missed this particular industry-wide memo, and thus the Civilization series will happily buck its own trends and well-established ideas in order to deliver something fresh every single timeI believe the usual rationale for making a new Civilization games was:Historically accurate where it needs to be, historically inaccurate when it’s more fun that wayOne of Sid Meier’s lessons he learned from a failed game was:
“when forced to be given a choice between giving the gamer ‘realism’ or ‘fun’, give them ‘fun’.” Show CommentsLeave A CommentHold on there, you need to login to post a comment…Nintendo Is Discontinuing Gold Points, One Of The Switch’s Best IncentivesNoooo, don’t do it!Toby Fox Shares Development Update On Deltarune Chapter 3 And 4″Still console testing”Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Adds Characters From “SEGA Universes”Update: IGN has an exclusive preview upFunko Fusion Is Deemed A “Complete Commercial And Critical Failure”Around 20 unconfirmed layoffs reportedMetroid Prime First 4 Figures ‘Samus Phazon Suit’ Sneak Peek, Pre-Orders Open SoonUpdate: Here’s a teaser of the light-up collector’s editionGame ProfileTitle:Sid Meier’s Civilization VIISystem:Nintendo SwitchAlso Available For:PS4, PS5Publisher:Take-Two InteractiveDeveloper:Firaxis GamesGenre:Simulation, StrategyPlayers:1 (6 Online)Release Date:Nintendo SwitchSeries:Sid Meier, CivilizationAlso Known As:Civ 7Reviews:Review: Sid Meier’s Civilization VII (Switch) – An Incredible Game That’s Not Quite ReadyOfficial Site:nintendo.comWhere to buy:Buy on Amazon
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