Everybody wants to rule the world

How do you fancy taking over the word today? Fine, now you just have to decide how you’re going to go about it. Are you an inspirational ruler, encouraging the arts, philosophy and science? Or perhaps you prefer to rule by the sword, conquering your way across the continents of the globe? However you chose to enforce your global rule, Civilization Revolution is an immersive game of strategy, history and cunning.

With over 16 civilizations to chose from, your role is to lead your people through history, the present day and beyond, to ultimate victory and world domination. If you’ve never played a Civilization game before (they’ve been around for over 20 years) then you can start of at the easiest ‘Chieftain’ level, which introduces you to the game with a rather patchy tutorial. You’re going to need to figure everything else out yourself, so best pay attention to what little help you do get. The interface has been completely overhauled for touch control and for the direct control of your units it’s pretty intuitive. Delve further into the options menus for managing your city and people, however, and it all becomes pretty confusing. When bringing games with this staggering level of complexity to the iPad, developers need to remember that it doesn’t come with . a 50 page printed manual, In-game help is sparse, and newcomers are going to need to invest a great deal of time in learning the ropes of this dense game.

There’s no disputing that, learning curve aside, this has to be one of the most professionally put together games on the App Store, which should come as no surprise considering its heritage. Putting the control firmly in your hands, this lets you completely customise the world and game settings. You can play for hours, days or months (and you probably will too) but you should never have to play the same level twice. This is a wonderfully complex and challenging game that comes highly recommended indeed.

Rating 3 Star