Civilization: Beyond Earth

Civilization: Beyond Earth is the latest instalment in the Civilization series. Using the Civilization 5 engine. It takes the game Beyond Earth to where the space victory takes you. To Alpha Centauri of course! You take control of an "organisation" that is based on the culture of a nation from the previous games, that launch a small colony to a new planet. You are not alone either, other organisations also launch colonies to the same planet and compete for the same resources, but the planet was not empty to begin with, and the natives don't like intruders.


You begin as usual, making a random world, and picking your organisation, but this time around, you don't have that many to choose from. Only 8 to choose from compared to the previous 43 available in Civilization 5. Sometimes Beyond Earth does feel more of an expansion than a full on game, as it misses some features which Civilization 5 added. Each organisation has a small bonus, some much better then others. But in the end, its all about your play style.

When the game begins you have a small area to choose as your founding outpost. No wandering around for the perfect first city this time. You begin with a single explorer unit too, who you should set to work finding special spots to "excavate".

One of the new editions is how technology is unlocked, your organisation is already the peak of Earth's previous research. This time you don't have a simple branching research tree but a research web. You start in the centre and work your way into whatever direction you want.

Another new addition is "affinity" and "quests". Quests aren't as good as you think, they could just be simple tasks that you'll end up completing as you play the game. When completed you get to choose a reward based on the completed task. For example; building a certain number of defence systems, you get either free maintenance or more defence.

Affinity is basically which way your colony is going to develop, like a karma system in other games. You get to choose from purity, supremacy or harmony. Purity is based on being unchanged by the planet and keeping your humanity, harmony is becoming one with the planet and embracing the alien life. While supremacy the best choice, to be simply put, to dominate the planet and use it to fuel your war machine.

Each different affinity unlocks separate abilities and makes your troops even more powerful as you progress. You can earn multiple points for each affinity, but the one with the majority of the points will change how your civilization looks and interacts with the other organisations. Each of the other organisations will pick a certain affinity while the player is free to choose whatever they please.

Alien life makes an appearance on the planet as insect based aliens, which are quite a powerful threat at the beginning of the game, but become a very minor annoyance very quickly. The aliens never really get in the way, and only attack if you come too close to them or their nests. The only alien that is able to cause a problem is the mighty "siege worm", who has a devastating attack power, but sadly, never actually attacks your colonies.

Now health is the main issue of your organisation, it depletes every time your cities grow and only increases with certain buildings and traits. All the way to mid game, you will suffer from low health, which causes a slew of negative effects, but after unlocking a few extra perks it goes from negatives straight to positive double digits. After that moment, you don't have to pay attention to it at all.

Spying also changes slightly from the previous games. Called "covert operations". You send in a "spy" into an enemy city and select a task, after 20 odd turns, it either fails, or succeeds, and you also either get caught or not. It may seem that isn't very interactive, but there is a nice list of tasks that covers most basic resources, like stealing research or energy. Or even technology or taking the city itself with a "coup". Spying is one of those set and forget things. After you do a task, you unlock more difficult tasks and your agents level up. The last task you unlock is the "coup" for taking the city and to do that, you need to complete over 5 tasks in that city.

Now the main complaint I have about the game is about something called "trade routes". You build a trade convoy and set it to trade with one of your cities or neighbours. You gain a small bonuses from the trade route which helps your cities to develop. The problem being that they cancel after 20 turns, but after setting up over 30 trade routes it gets a bit annoying having to plan another 30 trade routes because they cancel after 20-ish turns.

Conclusion:

The series is going forward, but backwards at the same time. It's enjoyable for the first few games, but will get repetitive quickly because it just simply does not have as many features as the previous games. If you like the genre, do go get it. It's enjoyable at times and annoying at others.

Get it here!