Civilization Beyond Earth Review

Beyond Earth plays a clever trick on the seasoned Civilization player. It begins by looking, feeling and playing very much like Civ V, simply transplanted to an alien landscape. But after only a few dozen turns, Beyond Earth opens up and the series of win conditions, which should be familiar to anyone who has played a previous Civ game, become almost tantalisingly attainable.

They’re not, of course. Not yet. But you’ll feel much closer to the endgame you’re aiming for much sooner in the game you’re playing and that has a somewhat peculiar effect on the Civ experience: you worry. You sit up. You pay much more attention to the units you’re moving and the instructions you’re giving at a very early stage. Before a hundred turns are taken, you’ll have levelled up a few unit types, researched several technologies or discoveries and possibly lost a unit or two to the hostile new environment.

Civ games have always allowed for a very gentle style of play. You languidly explore the scenery for a while, developing technology and building a nascent army while you wait for the game’s AI to do the same up until the point where everyone has a civilisation worth protecting, something to bargain with and an army to drive home the benefits of agreeing to the deal. And then you play your opening gambit. Then you decide how you’re going to approach relations with the other players on the map. Beyond Earth thrusts this upon you much sooner than previous Civ games and while it does indeed appear to be a very similar game to its predecessor, the speed with which it starts to unfurl the intricate glories of the Civilization style of game makes the way you play it much more active.

Beyond Earth begins as Civ V might have ended: with a rocket ship blasting into the stars. This former victory, wrought from the hours of careful scientific research and discovery in a previous game, now simply acts as a catalyst for this one and Beyond Earth’s new beginning is stripped of the hope and triumphalism that you might expect for one of the previous game’s win conditions. You’re starting again, in an alien landscape, from scratch. There seems to be a greater sense of vulnerability, a lot more danger, when you transplant Civ away from the caricatured historical figures.


That new feeling of danger is amplified by the sense that the opening stages of Beyond Earth are very much about colonisation of this new landscape. You can choose from three different types of world, mostly dictating the amount of seafaring needed, and you obviously still get to choose your civilisation too but you also have to select your starting cargo, crew and ship. This means that the opening turns of a Civ game now have a much wider range of variables because each choice presents you with a different combination of perk, technology and starting units that will influence how you take your first teetering steps to conquering this new world.

You can understand the whole game concept by watching this video.