The Civilizatations Revolution demo was released last week and I have to say that I was never really a fan of the previous titles under the same name, because I found them too in depth and quite boring. You build cities, move pieces around, build governments and other generally boring stuff… Those games never were really my “style.” Now, a new Civ game, with a bit of console polish is heading our way.

Check out my demo impressions and prepare to be amazed by how much fun I thought this demo was, after the jump!

At first, it seems like they’ve really dumbed down the game, then I realize that all the stuff they took out, was the boring stuff that I didn’t like in the PC versions.

To start off with, building cities is easy, the peasants do all the work, as they rightfully should. You don’t have to hold their hands and tell them what to do, they already know that they will be farming, mining, or logging. That allows you to build structures that will give your towns bonuses and wonders that will make you’re civilization better than the rest. You also build all of you units in towns, but beware, if you tell a town to make solders, it keep doing it until you tell it to do something else.

Having the better civilization tends to piss everyone else off. That’s where the other legendary leaders, who are all pricks, like Julius Cesar and Cleopatra come in. They do things to try to get money or technologies out of your society. If you send out unaccompanied settlers to build a new city, or a caravan to a foreign city to make money, they will pop up and say, “look what I found, pay me money so I won’t keep it.” What a total dick move. Sometimes they’ll want to trade tech for tech, other times they’ll say that you and your people are snobby and that unless you give them gold, or technology they will go to war with you. Once again, a dick move. After a while, you get tired of being dicked over and decide to eradicate their society from the face of the earth!

While combat is fun, it is a bit problematic.  It seems like the combat faults from the PC iterations of Civilization have reared their ugly head on the consoles.  Combat seems simple enough. Three of the same unit type can form together to make an army and you just move them around and attack stuff. The problem with that is, a group of warriors can be wiped out by an army of archers, there’s no way to attack with multiple units at once. Your army of archers should support you infantry in their attack. Maybe there’s a way to do that, that wasn’t covered in the tutorial… I hope it’s in the retail version…

All of the other crap about researching technologies to advance your civilization is pretty self explanatory, so I won’t go into that. Just keep moving forward.

In the end, the demo is meaty.  You’ll get to progress fairly far and get to explore most of your “earth” before your turns run out.  I’ve got to say, that I really enjoyed the demo.  It scratches an itch that has gone without scratching on the consoles for far too long. The only bad thing?

The demo left me wanting more and I can’t wait for July 8.