PC - 2K Games
The menu system is smooth and stylish; it is easy to use but still manages to add to the game. The intro movie helps get you in the mood, assisted by the high quality music playing while setting up a game. The process is straight forward and painless, allowing you to quickly get started.
Once in game there is only a short introduction text before you are allowed to start playing properly.
Once you get started it takes a little while to get the hang of what is happening, the game has great depth but luckily the new player can ignore a lot of it to begin with. The basics of achieving your goal, building a mighty civilisation, are easy enough but it is likely you will get wiped out by the computer a few times before you fully get to grips with it. Also, the game uses reminders every turn so that the crucial parts of running your civilisation are not forgotten, with helpful hints on the best courses of action.
The game is fun because it allows you such depth of control over your civilisation, it gives great satisfaction when your carefully planning pays off and you see your borders expand or your armies crush an enemy in battle. It is not just an automated process, its the players skills which decided how successful you are.
It can also be full of suspense and stress when you see hours of your hard work about to all go horribly wrong as your opponents army slips past you and heads straight for your capitol. Often a turn-based strategy game does not manage to create excitement but this really does; even though you cannot control the combat the little unit animations still manage to cause suspense.
The graphics are quite simple but effective, the method of smoothly zooming from a single fight to an overview of the whole world is particularly impressive and really lets you control things at all levels of detail. The short video clips that occur when you gain a major achievement let you see the best bits of your civilisation in all their glory which adds to the standard map view.
There are a range of difficulty settings so you can adjust the computer intelligence to your level, which can range from very easy to practically impossible to defeat. They also have personalities so that they do not all behave in the same way, some are aggressive while some want peace and to trade. Additionally, they are clever enough to know when not to attack a superior opponent and will try to bribe you into making peace if they know they cannot win.
The scale of the game is so great that after a bit of playing you can get completely absorbed in it, you have so many different things happening all over your civilisation it keeps you focused as you always have something that needs finishing or seeing through to the end.
The camera system is excellent as it gives you a top down view of the world that can be easily scrolled and zoomed to any scale you like. Perhaps the only criticism would be to have a smoother change from world view to the city view so you can more easily jump to a city and change something.
The controls are easy to use and intuitive; they are well designed, only needing to use the mouse to control the entire game.
There is no other strategy game that gives you the freedom to do whatever you want or allow you the same level of interaction and complex relationships with your opponents.
After turning the game off you are either left with a great feeling of satisfaction at having just conquered the world or a great desire to get back to playing and have another go. The feeling of satisfaction and pride in your civilisation which you spent hours building is the best bit about the game that keeps you going back.
Probably the most well made strategy game there is, the only slightly annoying thing about it is that your units will keep following their set route, even if an enemy has just popped up right behind them, some sort of confirmation prompt would be ideal here.