Old World Reviews

People call this a cross between Crusader Kings and Civilization and they're not wrong... Leaning more on the Civ side with a more focused time period and location. War is a big deal, it feels massive and although you can't doom stack, it still feels more epic than Civilization.. and with the limited orders you get to pick between developing and fighting when a war rages. This game may be better than Civ... But not as mindless. Even on easy modes I don't think you could mindlessly just auto-play without thinking.

I've been a Civ player since the first game. I've enjoyed the various iterations of that game over the years but didn't realize I was looking for something to come along and improve the 4X formula in so many different ways. Brian Johnson (lead designer for Civ IV) and Mohawk Games created a 4X masterpiece. There's a great talk by Brian (at a gaming convention, I think) on YouTube where he breaks down all the aspects of Civ that were not ideal to the gaming experience and how he and his team improved specific mechanics or changed fundamental Civ concepts. This has become my go-to stategy game and will be for a long time. The game is well supported with continuous updates and meaningful DLC that just keeps expanding on what the game has to offer. What I enjoy most of all is how this game creates an emergent narrative to your character's leadership and how that changes and develops from generation to generation. Just solid fun.

It's a proper turn-based strategy game. It's well optimized so it can run smoothly even on low-spec computers.

A lot of the standard things for games in this genre, but what I really enjoyed about it is the family/succession management. It's like the Sims meets Civ. Lots of fun.

This game is so deep, but it wears its depth so lightly. Everything interacts with everything else, but you can choose how much you want to immerse yourself in it all, and for me it was only at the upper difficulty levels that it really became necessary to study the systems. Yes, in many ways it's just Civilisation meets Crusader Kings, but I prefer it to either of those games: the characters and events give it so much more narrative interest than Civilisation, but equally the 4X structure gives it so much more direction than Crusader Kings. My biggest criticism is what a lot of other people have said: the gameplay differences amongst the nations are trivial, which means tomorrow's run with Greece is going to feel pretty much the same as yesterday's with Rome. Also, it's not exactly rich with visual spectacle, but then again I wouldn't choose a big-budget game with a bunch of loose ends and missing pieces over a mid-budget game with an obsessive attention to detail.

Absolutely lovely 4x game. Way more creative than the last few CIV games, and it has that "special something" which will make you suddenly lose hours when playing. Love it, I hope the developers continue supporting it going forward.

was really enjoying the early + mid game, then got into first empire war. It was such a waste of time, hated it so much didnt even make it to the 10 hour mark. Units can just fly across the map, so if you move any of your units to your border city watch them get picked off every turn, the AI can and will send units from 40-60 tiles away to snipe your units and you can't build anywhere as quickly as they can

Great game for a fair (maybe too low) price with a lot of really good additional content. If you have any questions the community and the developers are really helpful (on the forums and on discord).

All right, was sitting on this game for a long time, and admittedly kinda found it a tad hard to get into at first. But this little gem had that spark that pulled me closer. And part of that was, for me, the soundtrack. It combines Greek orthodox church chants in both Greek and Arabic, and other middle eastern bangers that boldly link the Middle-East of the bronze age to that of more recent times. And that is not to mention the peppering of some of Phillip Glass' violin concertos, making the gameplay loop nigh unstoppable as the constant stream of pure musical gratification is bliss, and stopping that is just painful. The score sets a tone that proudly shows a love for the setting of this game, despite any historical mismatches. Frankly the only thing missing is Peter Pringle singing the Epic of Gilgamesh ;) I'm not sure if soundtrack is something most players think a lot about, but it was a huge part of why I enjoyed spending so much time playing Civ 5, something that it's descendants in the series have blundered with tonal mismatches, non civilisation specific music and an almost offensive orchestral tone. Old World on the other hand solves this by scaling back its width and deepening it's scope. And that approach is insightful in more ways than one. Another aspect Old World deeply understands is the desire to experience the story of your empire. The character driven gameplay intermingled with a surprisingly rich event system immersed me into the game, worrying about schemes against me, cheating on my married partner with some power-hungry up and comer, assassinating my heir because another royal succeeding me would be better for the nation... The order system adds to that in the sense that you're not some disconnected all controlling entity moving your pawns, but a ruler of an ancient kingdom trying to coordinate its expansion within the limits of your command structure. Frankly, if you've been reading until here, just try it, start a game, restart when you realise you fucked up, and keep playing. Learning the mechanics of this game can be a bit daunting, but once you get it you start to realise how all of the resources dance together in what I consider to be one of the better balanced 4X games I've ever played.

9/10 A solid 4X game that perfectly combines Civ 6 with family dynasty elements from CK3. Mohawk actually designed every mechanic in this game correctly, unlike Civ where some systems make you wonder if they're just bad design choices or if they're incomplete to sell you DLC later. Honestly, the base game of Old World feels complete already. I don't even find myself wanting more DLC, which is pretty rare these days.