It’s been awhile since I’ve given a good little review of a video game. Well, outside of mentioning my mixed adoration of Artifact’s design and lamenting it’s anemic launch. Well, over the holidays, Firaxis has been slowly revealing all the bright and juicy details for their next expansion to the sixth entry of their Civilization series. Civilization has been a mainstay in my life and a cornerstone franchise of the video game industry. It’s the poster boy for the 4x strategy genre (so called for its key game mechanics surrounding eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) that tasks players with choosing a civilization from human history and navigating it from the stone age to modern times and beyond, racing against other heavy weights of textbooks to see who can achieve victory first.

Course, there’s a lot of definitions in that explanation that require a bit more exploration and certainly the discussion around each of them could be a post in of themselves. For simplicity sake, victory is typically broadly defined as achieving dominance in one of several key developmental fields, whether that by dominating all your opponents by capturing their capitals, completely a space faring project and being the first to successful set out into the emptiness of space or (much recently) convincing everyone through the sheer power of your pop music and blue jeans to adopt your culture over their own or anyone else’s.

The evolution of the series has certainly touched upon some fascinating concepts and later additions are starting to question even the basics of what it means to be a civilization or what victory truly means. Religion has become a mainstay element. Diplomatic relations between leaders and world governing bodies are becoming more prominent. Perhaps that most interesting is the development of cultural game mechanics and the idea of a victory sheerly through these cultural means and peeking at a world beyond colonial expectations and philosophies.

It is hard to tear Civilization and the 4x genre away from clearly western colonial ideals and the clearest example of how cultural influences heavily impact our lens through which we process our understanding of the world. Literally all four components of the 4x genre are key elements of colonization and, as a consequence, Civilization gameplay typically revolves around repeating the brutality and severe consequences of colonial activity. It values land solely by its productivity or commoditization and treats the people and environment in that territory as simply a further evaluation in the cost/benefit analysis of that territory. Sure, there might be quite an enticing deposit of steel over in those hills but is there enough arable land to warrant plopping a city down in that area and do I have the strength to beat out the Shoshone who are angling to settle that territory? Can I afford to have them gain access to more iron and build up more of an army to threaten my own borders?

It’s a decidedly limited scope to view all of human history and motivation though I have no intention to obfuscate the fact that colonialism certainly led to the foundation of my home country. In fact, it was the inclusion of said country, Canada, that brought me back to the genre recently. Civilization VI is far too expensive for my blood currently but it was the perfect time to jump into its predecessor Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Now all this rambling about colonialism isn’t some long winded academic whinging. It’s the very foundation for Beyond Earth – the spin-off game released between Civilization V and Civilization VI. Here is where I take a moment to explain my own biases and background. I’ve never played Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri which  most certainly had a huge influence in the development of Beyond Earth. As such, I cannot judge the game based on the expectations of those looking for a proper spiritual successor to that game. On the other hand, I think it can allow me to look at Beyond Earth with a little more objectivity.

Second, I have the complete version of Beyond Earth. Which is to say I’ve been playing on the Rising Tide expansion. I did briefly disable the expansion in order to earn an achievement impossible to unlock otherwise and I can definitely say whatever mixed reviews Beyond Earth received on launch are quite likely justified. If you’re interested in Beyond Earth, Rising Tide is a necessary component. That brief game without it certainly made the experience far more shallow and a lot less interesting.

With that out of the way, let’s get into the bones of Beyond Earth.

Civilization V had a science victory awarded to the player first to launch a spaceship to the far distant Alpha Centauri. Beyond Earth is a theoretical continuation of this timeline with some necessary assumptions set into place to make it work. First, it takes place quite a few years into our future where long distance space travel is possible. It also occurs after an event referenced simply as The Great Mistake which is the impetuous for these spacefaring seeding ships to launch into the next great frontier.

The Great Mistake is never truly elucidated, a clearly conscious decision by the developers likely to allow players their own interpretations of what constitutes its events. What does seem clear is some terrible ecological tragedy occurred that changed the shape of the earth and its geopolitical organization. If countries exist, they are certainly not drawn along lines familiar to us. Instead, Beyond Earth utilizes a “sponsor” system wherein twelve great conglomerations have pooled resources in order to huck a bunch of theoretically doomed individuals into almost certain death and obscurity. As a player, you get some choice in how these sponsors shaped the fateful ship that, against all odds, managed to find a habitable planet (of which you can choose some basic qualities like size, terrain and climate). Then, you set down on this planet and begin the difficult process of colonising it.

Course as fate (and game settings) would have it, you were not the only seeding ship to make the successful discovery and your opponents make planetfall an indeterminate number of turns after you. This is such a simple but I find effective measure since it gives you those initial turns of loneliness in an alien world that is surprisingly populated by some terrifyingly alien organisms. Functionally, this is no different than the starting turns of a regular Civilization game since you’re unlikely to discover your opponent right away anyway (and the AI always has some advantages to ‘catch up’ on the player regardless). But Beyond Earth has taken some notes from the Endless Legends game and tried to wrap more of its pacing in a loose narrative overview.

This narrative hinges entirely around your relationship with the planet around you. It breaks down three generic routes that a hypothetical space colonialist would have to their alien world. They could cling to their native home, trying to cultivate their new planet into a replicate of the Earth they left behind. They could seek to understand this strange and radically different environment, seeking to reach some sort of communalism with the radically and oftimes hostile nature. Finally, they could lean heavily on the advanced technology that brought them here, incorporating the new resources they’ve discovered to develop their cities and themselves into hitherto unimagined heights of new synthetic superiority.

These ideologies, named Purity, Harmony and Supremacy, serve as the primary pathway to victory. By specializing and developing your ideology, you’ll eventually unlock a means to bring this discovery and taming of a new world narrative to a close. If you’re an adherent to Purity, you eventually establish contact with Old Earth, construct a warp gate through which the population can travel to and rescue the old world from whatever indescribable horror had led to its near extinction. Harmony members turn their back wholly on Old Earth, recognizing a heightened awareness and sentience with the planet itself. Through a fusion of gene manipulation and technological integration, they develop a mind flower that will allow communication with the planet as a whole, bringing ultimate unity with the human species to the oddly coordinated flora and fauna already found there. Lastly, Supremacy establishes contact with Old Earth but not to bring its remaining refugees to their new home. No, using their advanced cybernetic enhancements, they send an undefeatable “diplomatic envoy” back to earth in order to cure the last remaining vestige of humanity of the flaws of their decidedly weak meat bodies so everyone can live peacefully as one synthetic society.

There’s also a strangely disconnect victory condition of making contact with some alien species that had left a bunch of their own structures behind on the planet like an irresponsible child forgetting to put away their toys and discovering their walkie-talkie has managed to fall into someone else’s hands.

It’s an interesting system and one that kind of encapsulates Beyond Earth. It’s different and neat but not without some glaring flaws. For one, despite the emphasis on narrative, there’s not a whole lot of incorporation of these ideologies in with the leaders. Despite each representative of the sponsors having a fairly interesting and detailed background, there’s nothing stopping the exploitative and money driven Hutama from seeking harmony with the earth (like I did in my first game) despite there being little narrative justification for doing so. On the one hand I can understand not limiting player choice and strategy but on the other hand, the game does anyway in regards to the quests which provide specific rewards to your buildings when they are completed. These quests are essentially decided based strictly on the rewards and not on their narrative consistency, so I don’t know why there was so much emphasis placed on splitting them in the way they did.

On the other hand, I do like the idea of customising your units and structures towards your strategy. There’s just little rhyme or reason for how they justify the customization. Furthermore, the sole determinant for your ideology is based on your research order (and random quest rewards). So you are forced rather early into deciding which victory condition you want to pursue as any of the major three require you have a staggering level fifteen in their respective ideology. So once you land on your little plant, you get some early turns to check out your starting area and basically commit to whether you want resettle old earth here, make friends with the aliens or just assimilate everyone into your collective hivemind. There’s a bit of mechanical nuance to these three victories that means you need to decide early what you are doing.

A Harmony victory is the most research intensive but the least interactive. You want to have a wide presence on the map through multiple cities. There are two buildings you can construct that will speed the process of the mind flower’s awakening. Course, Beyond Earth is running on the Civilization engine, so you have a natural anti-synergy in that the more cities you have the more research it costs to unlock the mind flower wonder. This naturally pushes you down the science virtue tree which makes technology cost penalties lower from number of cities. Thus, a Harmony victory requires a science and settlement focus which at least aligns slightly with the technologies that give you Harmony affinity (mostly ones to alleviate unhealthiness which is a global malus on your cities’ growth and production that grows due to number and size of cities).

What you’ll find, however, is that you start slipping into a Harmony/Supremacy hybrid since Supremacy technologies are generally science boost technologies. Rising Tide added hybrid affinities which allows your units to customize in different directions from the primary three ideologies. It’s a necessary component but, sadly, should have opened alternative victory conditions as well which they sadly don’t.

Finally, I find it really incongruous that you can murder the indigenous life without impunity with no negative towards the victory condition that follows you merging with said indigenous life.

Purity and Supremacy are a bit too similar as well. They both involve researching a satellite to contact Earth then building a wonder like the mind flower. Course, the two gates are on different tech but it’s what follows after the gate that makes things a little more interesting. Purity needs to settle twenty refugees in separate colonies that follow normal city settling rules. Supremacy has to shunt one thousand strength worth of units through its gates. Thus Supremacy is going to require a high production city or have built up a large army reserve. Unfortunately for both gates, they each can only transport one unit a turn. So Supremacy ends up needing a fair bit of technology in order to unlock the highest strength units in the game to make its progress as fast as possible. It’s still less than Harmony since the strongest Supremacy unit is just a few tech nodes from its gate but it does require a lot of the firaxis resource. Purity, however, need only protect the colonists so once their gate gets up there’s a pretty hard twenty turn timer to stop them. Though their colonists do move slowly so it’s helpful to either have spots picked out along the ocean or build roads to the places you want to keep them.

So there are some interesting elements and strategies that arise from these different victory conditions. But they don’t intersect with the other elements of the game particularly well. For instance, while the leaders are colourful and interesting there’s a neat dynamism with their visual appearance changing to reflect which ideology they are pursuing. It’s a neat visual flair that’s great for quickly understanding diplomatic relations just by looking at the leader screen. It’s unfortunate that the leaders themselves have little connection with the goals.

There are some interesting abilities and I like that Beyond Earth leans more towards game warping uniques to set their sponsors apart. Daoming is capable of building wonders instantaneously in any city that does not have a wonder. That’s a pretty incredible ability tempered only by the fact that none of the game’s wonders really contribute to any of the victory conditions. CEO Fielding has incredibly fast spies who can accomplish their covert operations in half the time as her opponents and really opens up the espionage game. But, once again, this doesn’t really predispose her towards any ideology. While flexibility is appreciated, I think it holds back both gameplay and narrative. Without some direction, the leaders rather come off as generic. Half the time Elodie is in my game, she’s a warlord conquering the entire map. Other times she’s just sitting back trying to put out wonders and looking to build the mind flower. Outside of her avatar, there’s not much that really distinguishes her from Bolivar. It would sacrifice some replayability but if they could have given the leaders some manner of predisposition, it would have been great. Make some more likely to pursue warmongering or purity. Others focused on establishing contact (and generating lots of money to accomplish this) or looking to set up the mind flower. I think with more distinct victory conditions they could have made the leaders even more prominent and put their personalities front and centre. I can’t help but compare it once more to Endless Legend where some factions are cut off entirely from victory conditions due to their perks and detriments.

One thing that Beyond Earth does do really well is lean into its science fiction theming. I really like the separation between land and water cities and how both have slightly different mechanics for how they work. Then there’s the woefully underutilized satellite layer which has so much potential for additional strategy and development that it could turn into something really unique and distinct.

Beyond Earth is ultimately an ok game. I’ve enjoyed my time with it and don’t regret the purchase by any means. There’s lots of really wonderful ideas and ingenious twists on the genre kicking around in this game. I would really like to see these ideas given room to grow. I’d also like to see it push the boundaries of a 4x game and maybe start examining some of the core game mechanics and ask what can it do differently. Could you make a Beyond Earth like game that has different focus rather than on conquering, exploiting and exterminating? Technological or ecological integration are ideas ripe for bending the traditional approach to these types of strategy games. And I’m not opposed to the narrative elements but I am unsure how you can reconcile them with the base game mechanics as well as form a cohesive story arc.

At any rate, I know this review is far too late to the discussion to provide much for impact on the game or it’s development. But perhaps it can serve as a source of inspiration or merely act as a resource for looking back on a release and examine why it wasn’t just quite right. Since I’ve kind of vowed to work through my backlog as well as do more of my purchasing on dated releases for cost reduction, I think I may have more of these retrospective looks in the future.

Or we can just see if older games truly stand the test of time.