Recent reviews by Windows Error

As someone with over 1500 hours in Civ 5 (but a bit less in other titles like 6 and BE), I would probably put this game at middle of the road. It takes some of the good aspects of games 5 and 6 and combines them, but then does a complete 180 with the gameplay design and GUI which just makes me sad.

I'll start with the positive things. Something I loved about Civ 5 was the ability to grow really tall, insanely OP cities. Of course, I appreciated the balance that Civ 6 brought to this by creating districts and having to use your tiles more efficiently. What I love about Civ 7 was how they combined these approaches. You can create custom districts with cool synchronized bonuses which are often specific to the leader/civ you are playing as. The mix of tile improvements, scaling bonuses on those tiles with progress, and buildings/wonders you can place all feel fantastic. City building/planning is absolutely one of the best parts of this game.

There are some new unique diplomatic actions such as being able to place economic/cultural sanctions on other players. Combat has been significantly improved with the addition of army commanders and fleet commanders. Some of the classic features such as terrain modifiers from earlier civ games are still included. The art style is excellent and I have no complaints there.

Resources have been changed up significantly. You actually have to assign certain types of resources to your cities, and there are different bonuses for whether they are assigned or unassigned, or even what kind of settlement you assign it to. You can also produce resources with factories in the later game. You get additional resources from trade routes in addition to GPT.

NO MORE BARBARIANS. Some will love it. Some will hate it. What you get instead are Independent Powers. They can either be hostile (like barbarians) or you can befriend them and effectively turn them into your city state ally. There are economic, cultural, scientific, and militaristic independent powers, each reflecting a possible victory type. Unlike in previous games, there are a ton of options to choose what bonuses you get and how you interact with the city state.

And that's about where the compliments end, unfortunately.

I was intrigued by the concept of different ages at first, but in reality it's not very fun. It does helps with game lag by keeping some things compartmentalized. The Crisis feature seemed like an interesting challenge at first, but almost ALL of the important/fun gameplay happens towards the end of an age. So just as your progress seems to become exponential, it isn't anymore. You can enable/disable this feature in the advanced game settings PRIOR to starting a game. The names of cities/towns also change between the ages which is incredibly confusing. I suppose that's realistic, but it completely ruins the immersion for me as I reorient myself.

I have mixed feelings about being able to choose a separate Civilization and Leader. It does create for some genuinely fun gameplay, and seems to create a lot more longevity for the base game without mods. But while it's fun, it's another confusing element. The game is based in real world history, but then you have Napoleon playing as the Chinese Ming dynasty. And if you're not careful, you might not realize that a leader who wasn't doing well in the previous era is now an absolute monster because of their new civilization, or vice versa. I wish there was an option to lock certain leaders to certain civilizations without having to manually set up a whole game by hand. I definitely yearn to play some more historically accurate games, but as it is, you CANNOT do that in this game. Hopefully with updates and mods that will change.

Lastly, the victory conditions... Oh boy. There are only four ways to win. Decades ago, Civilization V had 5 different victory types, not including all of the maps/scenarios with custom conditions. I have gripes with some victory conditions more than others. The cultural victory is awful. It's so much fun up until the modern age. In the last age, you have to train explorers with an insanely high production/gold cost and slowly move them around the map to dig up "artifacts." Sounds competitive and fun, but it's awful. You walk your explorers halfway across the world over the course of many turns only for the AI to occupy the tile first and you just lose. It is incredibly frustrating. Domination victory is significantly easier. You capture way less cities and build a nuke and you just win, which is asanine considering how difficult a cultural victory is. Economic victory needs to be planned for from day 1 of your game because it is VERY hard. Science victory is probably the easiest. Just play a leader/civ combo with high science, and complete some production projects and you win.

Some things are still insanely unbalanced, even after this most recent patch (4/23/25), but that will likely improve with time.

Overall, I think it's worth giving it a shot. I do have hope with with updates and mods, this could become a fantastic game. But it's not one right now. It's very, VERY incomplete and disappointing in a number of ways. I wouldn't buy any DLC out of the gate ESPECIALLY if you are a hardcore Civilization or strategy game fan. Try out the base game and save yourself some potential disappointment.

very good

This is by far the best of all the Wolfenstein games, in all categories, except graphics. The newer games clearly win there.

This game has the most satisfying gun mechanics of any game I have ever played. Not the most accurate though. Wolfenstein also has an incredible and immersive story.

All in all, this is one of my favorite games. Definitely worth whatever it sells for nowadays.

This is the best game in all of the world. It's worth whatever price it's listed at for all DLCs. In fact, it's worth twice that.