If you have ever thought you could do a better job running the country, Civilization Revolution puts your leadership and planning skills to the test. Revolution is essentially a resource-management and strategy hybrid for those who like to play king rather than God. Each game begins with a flock of settlers laying down their flag to start your first city. To make things a little more hectic, and fun, you can create more settlers and build additional cities to expand the reach of your power. From there it is a race to win the game in one of four methods: Domination, Culture, Economic, and Technological. Each method has its own benchmark to reach, with Domination ending when capture all enemy capitals and Technological ending when you reach space. You control the resources your workers harvest most, as well as what types of buildings, wonders, and people your city generates. You also get to decide what how your city spends its time researching. Being the first to invent certain technologies, such as the alphabet or mass media, will give you additional bonuses. Based on your progress in the game's four key attributes, you will begin to attract great people to your cities.
Your civilization is not alone in the game, as single player games pit you against four computer-led civilizations joining in the race to win via one of the four methods. Their involvement with your kingdom largely depends on which of the game's five difficulty levels you are playing at. The more difficult you make the game the more likely you are to receive constant threats of war. The other civilizations never attack you without warning, and typically send you a demand for either technology information or gold in exchange for temporary peace. It is up to you whether you give in to their demands, attempt to barter them down to a lesser price, or call their bluff in the hopes they will relent. Sometimes, they will sheepishly back down after speaking with their 'advisors', and other times you can expect an army or battleship at your border within a turn. Plan your city's resources and personnel wisely, as under-defended cities will fall quickly to the opposition. While losing secondary cities is more of a hit to your ego, lose control of your capitol city and the game is over.
The demands of the other world leaders are actually entertaining thanks to the cartoonish personality each character in the game gets; including silly mumbled 'voices' reminiscent of The Sims. The other leaders are not always out to destroy you, and will occasionally even send gifts, such as dancing bears, to earn your respect and ongoing peace. You also have the option to go into the diplomacy menu at any point and contact the opposing leaders to negotiate the trade or sale of technologies and discuss other 'world events' and leaders. When engaged in battle, the game gets a little deeper by rewarding military units for victories with upgrades.
The game attempts to keep things fresh by constantly ticking the years forward. With each new era, the list of available buildings, personnel, technology, and wonders available to you increases slightly. You can eventually even stick it to Al Gore and invent the internet yourself. You also have a choice to make when famous people find their way into your cities. You can either trade them in for a bonus in another category, usually either a gold boost or a chance to finish studying a technology faster, or settle them in one of your cities. The level of control you have over your civilization is great, but it feels somewhat stunted by how quickly things tend to end.
The game provides you with sixteen different civilizations to rise to glory with, each with their own individual bonus to kick start their city. Despite the unique bonus to each, none of the sixteen offerings really plays very different from one another; which is where the issues with the game really begin. Games are typically over in about an hour if you focus your efforts on one winning category, and only about half an hour longer if you dabble in all four. The game allows you to do quite a bit, but unless you are steadfastly aiming toward a technological victory, the game will likely be over long before anyone is close to shooting for the stars.
Being a PC port, the controls are the biggest obstacle for a successful transition to the 360. Thankfully, the developers did a fine job mapping the controls from the keyboard and mouse to the controller. It takes some getting used to, especially in terms of cycling through cities, but halfway through your first game it begins to feel natural. It is easy to navigate through all you can do each turn, mostly because the game is intelligent when it comes to maintaining status-quo for you. When you tell a city to make a resource that you can have multiple of, like warriors, that city will continue to crank them out as quickly as possible until you ask them to create something else. If the city is building something there can only be one of, such as a wonder, the game forces you to specify what the city should do next after it has finished.
