This little title packs surprising depth for a handheld.
The Bad: sometimes hard to control, numbers sometimes don't mean much, other civs are mindless war machines, bad sound, no tutorial
I love Civilization. I really do. I've been a fan for almost a year starting with Civ IV. Unfortunately, some games in the series have been a let down *cough*CivV*cough*, but overall the games are amazing.
That being said, I approached CivRev with something of an apathetic attitude. "Ok," I said to myself, "it is Civilizaiton, yes, but it is in DS form." I was not a strong believer in good DS games. From my experience they seem to be few and far between. Gladly, I was mistaken.
CivRev packs a lot in that little DS cartridge. The game is noticably smaller than Civ IV, because, of course, it is for consoles. This port for the DS works very well.
The game's strategy is a bit simplified from CivIV, but it is not actually a bad thing. The units are easy enough to figure out. They each have a basic attack and defense number making it a bit easier to figure out which units should be placed where. There is no rock, paper, scissors style match up as is traditional for games of this type. Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing either.
City management is a breeze. You just go to the city screen and select the unit or building you want built. You can go in and tell the city what tiles to work, but I find it simpler to let it auto work the tiles. The auto work and emphasis towards a particular resource system is actually very intuitive, even with cities close to each other.
The tech tree is nice as well. Each of the technologies tell what type of victory they will lead to. Of course, you need a steady diet of all of them to survive. Unfortunately, the tech tree doesn't bother to tell you what each unit or building is or what it does and so you are forced to guess on your first couple playthroughs.
The control of units is pretty intuitive, but it sometimes can get a bit annoying when you need to select specific units. Sometimes you could have a unit selected and be trying to select another unit and your current unit wanders into a tile you didn't mean it to go to. There is no way to scroll out either, but that isn't all that missed as you can easily scroll around to find what you're looking for anyway.
One of my main problems with the game is the system of gaining culture, gold, and science. When setting the priority for the city, there is no way to say that you want a mixture of all three or to tell the game how many trade points you want going towards them. Also, the culture and science numbers don't mean a whole lot, because the game isn't clear as to how many culture points you need to get a great person. Indeed, it doesn't even keep track of how many culture points you have. The science number doesn't show up either in the tech tree or otherwise and the techs themselves don't tell you how many beakers are needed for the tech.
The game is also surprisingly harsh on newcomers to the game and newcomers to Civ itself. There is no tutorial and even worse, no in game Civlopedia. These features are sorely missed on the first couple playthroughs while struggling to figure out what a courthouse does or how benificial a certain unit or tech will be.
The diplomacy is dumbed down to the point of unrecognizability in this game. All of the civs are mindless war machines that will attack you. Every one of them will attack you at some point during the game, no exceptions. As you get close to victory of any kind, they will all declare war no matter what.
The game looks decent for the DS engine, especially considering everything that is packed into the little cartridge. However, the sound leaves much to be desired. There is no music, and the sound effects are annoying to the point of wanting to kill yourself. The sound is best left off while listening to other things.
Overall, however, this game is solid. It is a solid game for the DS and is quite worthy of the title Civilization, unlike some other games I could mention.... It is a godsend people wanting to play Civ on long trips or on a subway or other such transportation.