Civilization: Beyond Earth
Looking back a decade and a half on, it’s difficult to comprehend the sheer embarrassment of riches that came out of the PC gaming scene in its late 1990s golden age. Between 1998 and 1999, PC gamers were blessed with the likes of Half Life, Baldur’s Gate, Thief, Starcraft, Homeworld, Unreal Tournament, System Shock 2 and many, many others – not least of which was turn-based strategy and science fiction classic Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (or SMAC as its often fondly know).
More than 15 years on, Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, billed as a spiritual successor, has returned to SMAC’s core concept – essentially ‘Civilization In Space’ – in an attempt to bring it bang up to date with the evolution that the main Civ series has gone through over the years. There’s the obvious update to visual fidelity but the SMAC experience always had a subtly different flavour to the Civilization games proper and Firaxis have their work cut out to capture the character and imagination that that the 1999 cult classic had in spades.
Civilization: Beyond Earth follows the same basic gameplay template that has formed the backbone of the series since its first inception in the early 1990s. Players gradually build an empire across the game’s tile-based procedurally generated map, developing infrastructure to increase resource output, build new cities and fuel technological developments. As rival civilizations are encountered, they can be met with the olive branch or the sword, with a significant portion of the game given over to managing relationships with other leaders and military conquest.
Of course, the sci-fi setting of Beyond Earth sees the series’ usual timeline of Stone Age to modern day jump forward into the far future. The game takes place on an alien planet, humankind’s first attempt at colonising the stars, and is replete with all manner of alien flora, fauna and resources that must be overcome – or exploited – to develop your nascent civilization. As with SMAC, these differences are much more than cosmetic and it’s here that Beyond Earth ups the ante even over its source of inspiration.
The alien inhabitants of humanity’s new home are a belligerent lot. Taking on the role of the roaming barbarians seen in the main Civilization series, alien life forms will routinely assault your units while thick miasma on some tiles inhibits your ability to expand early on. Although alien incursions can be reduced and later virtually eliminated through technological advances, they can be exceptionally aggressive in the early game and significantly enliven the first hundred turns or so.
Hostile xenos also encourage players who prefer to focus on economic and technological development – such as myself – to pay due attention to the military side of the game. Beyond Earth makes significant additions to the core Civ experience here, including the addition of orbital units that can buff other troops and spy on your enemy. Enhancements have also been made to ranged combat. Most significant though is the upgrades system for units, which is closely tied to the game’s new ‘affinity’ system.
The affinity system is a completely new mechanic which essentially corresponds to your civilisation’s philosophy. There are three main affinities in the game, each of which influences the units you may build and which upgrades you have access to. Progress down each path is made through your in-game decisions about how to use resources and which quests you choose to pursue, another addition new to Beyond Earth.
The Harmony affinity sees a civilisation attempt to exist symbiotically with their new extra-terrestrial home and leads to units such as alien-human hybrids. Supremacy is a belief in the transformative power of technology and leads to cybernetic units and artificial intelligence. Purity, meanwhile, is a rejection of both of these paths in favour of a belief in the perfection of humanity as it is and leads to advanced super-soldiers and tanks clearly influenced by Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 universe.
The affinity concept runs deep in Civilization: Beyond Earth and also influences the game’s reimagined technology web. While previous Civilization games featured a roughly linear tech-tree, Beyond Earth allows players to choose between a much wider ranges of techs from the outset. There’s no single ‘best’ path, but once again your choices strongly impact the kind of civilisation you develop, with some techs pushing you further towards a particular affinity. In truth this can be a little overwhelming at first but it makes for a much deeper game on the higher difficulty levels where you have to make hard choices about the future of your civilization.
While Beyond Earth is a rich and immersive experience that is in many ways a worthy successor to SMAC, there is one area where it unfortunately falls short. Much of Alpha Centauri’s unique charm and character came from its superb writing, manifested in its deep and thought-provoking storyline and the characterisation and philosophical differences between its factions and superbly realised leaders. While some of Beyond Earth’s new systems – most notably affinity - clearly try to encapsulate these aspects of SMAC, they lack its elegance and artful synergy between writing and strategy gameplay.
Some may also find their first impressions of the game are marred slightly by a sense of overfamiliarity. While Beyond Earth brings a bag of new tricks to the party, the core gameplay is – perhaps inevitably – virtually identical to Civilization 5 and its expansions, even with the sci-fi skinning. This isn’t entirely a bad thing – Civ 5 and especially its Brave New World expansion were a master class in turn-based strategy design – but those looking for revolutionary changes to the classic Civ formula won’t find them here.
It’s probably true that Beyond Earth could have been released as an expansion pack for Civilization 5 but that doesn’t make it poorer as a standalone title by any means. The Skinny actually found that Beyond Earth came into its own on the second playthrough. Armed with a better understanding of the game’s new systems, we were able to appreciate the extent to which it’s possibly to really shape the direction your civilisation takes and the weight that your decisions have in game.
Ultimately, Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth perfectly captures that “just one more turn” feeling that the Civilization series does so very well. While it was never quite going to quite live up to the rose-tinted view of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, it’s a deep and superbly immersive game in its own right that successfully builds upon the time-honoured Civilization formula. With all the quality we’ve come to expect from a Firaxis game, this is one that it’s possible to lose hundreds upon hundreds of hours in.