Comparing Civilization V to contemporary strategy games is entirely pointless. Imagine if Modern Warfare had come out alongside Quake II. There is simply nothing comparable out there, not least because the strategy genre has become the province of indie developers and niche publishers. Civ V is a towering, AAA release with millions of dollars worth of polish in an era where questionably localized Russian titles are all that strategy gamers have to tide them over for months at a time. It's also a delightfully fresh take on a formula that has been slowly iterated on for more than two decades.

The heart of the Civilization fantasy is unchanged. You still manage cities, developing them from rude collections of mud huts into gleaming modern metropolises. Vast armies and armadas are again at your command, waging global war for conquest, defense, or resources with everything from spears to nukes. The land must still be worked, the primordial wilderness tamed through your people’s sweat and blood. Your ultimate goal is yours to choose: Diplomatically unite the people of the world under your benign leadership, launch a viable colony ship into outer space, conquer the globe through force of arms, or create a glorious utopia through enlightened civility.

Civ V's genius lies in the way that Firaxis has aggressively chopped the number of decisions that a player has to make during the course of a game while taking away almost none of the meaningful ones. As a hardcore Civ player, I appreciate some of these ancillary aspects of the design, but the removal of all the fat is unquestionably Civ V's greatest accomplishment.

Comparing Civilization V to contemporary strategy games is entirely pointless. Imagine if Modern Warfare had come out alongside Quake II. There is simply nothing comparable out there, not least because the strategy genre has become the province of indie developers and niche publishers. Civ V is a towering, AAA release with millions of dollars worth of polish in an era where questionably localized Russian titles are all that strategy gamers have to tide them over for months at a time. It's also a delightfully fresh take on a formula that has been slowly iterated on for more than two decades. The heart of the Civilization fantasy is unchanged. You still manage cities, developing them from rude collections of mud huts into gleaming modern metropolises. Vast armies and armadas are again at your command, waging global war for conquest, defense, or resources with everything from spears to nukes. The land must still be worked, the primordial wilderness tamed through your people’s sweat and blood. Your ultimate goal is yours to choose: Diplomatically unite the people of the world under your benign leadership, launch a viable colony ship into outer space, conquer the globe through force of arms, or create a glorious utopia through enlightened civility. Civ V's genius lies in the way that Firaxis has aggressively chopped the number of decisions that a player has to make during the course of a game while taking away almost none of the meaningful ones. As a hardcore Civ player, I appreciate some of these ancillary aspects of the design, but the removal of all the fat is unquestionably Civ V's greatest accomplishment.