Sid Meier's Civilization®: Beyond Earth™ Reviews

Basically sci-fi Civ 5, but worse. While the game still has Civ in its core, its features seem undercooked, but full of potential. 7/10

The UI is very complicated, but once getting used to it they can be fun. Plus the Price is so affordable when there is a sale.

This game has significant issues operating on modern hardware. While I enjoy the game overall, if you have a windows 10 system with anything newer than a 20 series, expect problems. I cant even open it anymore despite trying every troubleshooting tip on the community group.

I passed this up when it came out but I wish I hadn't. Kind of feels like Starship Troopers and civ 5 mechanics combined. I would check this out on sale if you love the series.

Game doesn't play in modern monitors without forcing it to launch in windowed mode in the .ini files. If they're leaving issues like that on the table, it's only going to get worse from here on in. Refunded.

I played 510 hours of this game and thought I'd finally give it a review. So here we go: Personally I think Civ:BE got a bad rep. It's really a fun game, and has some really good things to it. But yes, if you try to look at it with 'rose colored goggles' for the old 'Alpha Centauri', you may not like it. So you really have to take it for what it is. [h1]The Good[/h1] - The unit evolutions. Personally my favorite part of this game. - The lore. - The different map biomes. [h1]The Mixed[/h1] - The difficulty. When you start, you feel powerless, as it should be. But after you get a few units to evolve, the 'power creep' becomes a 'run away freight train'. So it starts very difficult, and by the end it's far too easy. [h1]The Bad[/h1] - The randomness of starts. If you get a bad start location, you might as well just restart the game and try again. Because a bad start location, is not salvageable no matter what. - The jumbled tech-web. There's no definitive path. You end up with all 3 paths (Supremacy, Purity, and Harmony), and all 3 maxed out no matter what you do. But all in all, it's still a fun game. And yes, it still runs fine.

Shallow. Unengaging. Comparing it to Alpha Centauri and this game feels like 20% of that. Waste of time.

It needs mods, but when it does, it is absolutely exceptional and I really hope they remake this game The story is probably the main highlight as well as the victory story lines This is easily my favourite CIV game out of all of them It's a shame the developers have been failing at understanding what makes CIV great lately

I want to like this game but it crashes literally all the time. It is super unstable and currently unplayable for a huge number of people. I keep trying to play it, and it crashes every time I load a world.

It's not *bad* per se, but it's not good either. There's a lot of stuff here that's just an objective step backward from Civ 5, even very simple UI stuff. Take for example the small bar that runs along the top of your screen in Civ games. This is used to display basic information, like what resources you have, what your general happiness level is, how many trade routes you have available and how many are active, etc. For some reason, in Beyond Earth they chose to REMOVE the trade routes from this bar. Now if you want to see how many trade routes you have and which are active, you have to click on "additional information" and then select the trade route overview. The "additional information" button is also on the bottom right now, along with spy overview and a bunch of other things. It's completely flipped from Civ 5 (and Civ 6), so it constantly throws your brain for a loop because you're not used to going to the bottom right corner for information. Diplomacy is also kind of a mess. From what I've been able to tell so far, there isn't actually a way to trade for resources. Your "trade" agreements with other civs are more like small-scale research agreements, and what you can barter for is dependent on the civ's personality. For example, Al Falah seems to be focused on production because their agreements give you stuff like an increase in energy yield for your capital, letting you build worker units for free, etc. It's not bad, you can get some useful stuff, it's just odd that you're not trading for actual resources. I don't have any Firaxite, but the American Reclamation Corporation does. Why can't I just ask to trade for it? But what can be much worse is your actual relationship with other civs. If you are "cooperating" with another civ (this game's equivalent of being friendly), you may be tempted to form an alliance with them. For the love of god, DO NOT do this. I made the mistake of proposing an alliance with Al Falah and was IMMEDIATELY thrust into a war with every single civ they were at war with (half the civs on the map). Then there are other mechanics that are just half-baked. The xeno wildlife is this game's version of barbarians, and the *idea* behind them is cool. Most of them aren't outright hostile and they'll leave you alone as long as you don't get too close. You can destroy their nests to keep them from spawning if they're in the way, but that can be risky early on. They're all connected by a hive-mind so it'll make the rest of them REALLY mad at you. Conversely, you can research an ability that lets your explorers "leash" xeno units and make them your own (there's also research that let you produce your own xeno units). The problem is, leashing wild xenos is mostly pointless. They're quickly outpaced by normal military units, and you can't upgrade them. For example, the xeno cavalry unit is just humans riding on raptor bugs. If you leash a few wild raptor bugs, you *should* be able to upgrade them to cavalry units once you've researched alien domestication. But you can't. Why? I dunno. Most of the game is like this. There's a lot of neat ideas here, but none of them were ever fleshed out. Firaxis only released one small expansion for this game and a map pack, then promptly abandoned it.