Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)Most games with numbered sequels tend to iterate and grow on their previous instalments. After all, you dont want to alienate your audience by upending key systems and creating a substantially different experience from what theyre used to, it just makes sound economic sense. Change things just enough so that it rides that line between familiarity and shininess.Firaxis apparently missed this particular industry-wide memo, and thus the Civilization series will happily buck its own trends and well-established ideas in order to deliver something fresh every single time, and that is no less the case with Sid Meiers Civilization VII, which well be calling Civ 7 for the sake of our keyboard.Lets be clear, it sticks to the same broad ideas as ever, but tried and trusted mechanics have gone out the window; not because they didnt work, but because, hey, its time to try something different.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)As with every game prior, Civ 7 has you take on the role of a real-life world leader each with their own unique bonuses and quirks looking to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate, and coining the 4X genre presumably named by people with first-letter blindness. In Civ 7 youre going to need to try and achieve one (or realistically, more than one) of four goals before your opponents, and those four Es we mentioned earlier are the way to do it.Simple, right? No, not right. The reality of the game is that there are a staggering number of ways to achieve your chosen goals, each with the potential to be as nuanced and calculated as a well-played game of chess. Or you could go full militaristic and nuke everyone else, declaring yourself the victor by default. However, itll be a while before youll be able to do so, at least with actual nuclear warheads, because Civ 7 changes the previous progression system by introducing three Ages of humanity.Youll start in Antiquity, which has you start at the literal birth of your new civilisation with nary but a settler to start your very first city. Youll need to research advanced human technology such as pottery and what to do with animals and systematically work your way through all the major technological advancements of our species. And theres not much in the way of shortcuts for this, unlike the previous entry in the series. Youre going to have to work for each and every one of these the old-fashioned way, or steal them from your neighbours.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)Yes, diplomacy has had potentially the biggest overhaul this time around, mostly requiring you to use the new Influence points to better or intentionally worsen your relationship with the other blossoming nations. You can also actually see your leader as well during these moments, which is a nice touch.A personal favourite addition to this system is the ability to reject a denouncement from a rival, spending hard-earned Influence points to stop a leader from driving a wedge between your people. Its a small addition, but one that makes a formal war feel more tied to public opinion than simply two leaders having beef. Whether thats more true-to-life or not is debatable.Following the Antiquity Age is the Exploration Age, and the way this change works is a little strange, but oddly refreshing. Your cities and towns remain the same, but you may have some of your units trimmed if you dont have enough Commanders (oh, well get onto them, dont you worry) or settlements to house them properly.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)Its not entirely clear how the system works in its entirety, but the units you do keep will be upgraded to Age-appropriate examples. Were still absolutely gutted that our Purabhettarahs were upgraded to mere horses with blokes in the saddle, but apparently war elephants arent cool enough to survive into 400CE.This transition almost feels like a New Game Plus moment, where youre sort of starting anew, sort of not. It helps to bookend each third of the game, and stops one player from potentially blasting a satellite into orbit whilst another is just working out how to make boats not sink. It also gives us the sense weve completed a game without having to sacrifice an entire weekend only for Harriet Tubman to go to war with us yet again, distracting King Xerxes from his honest scientific aims.But the Exploration Age is all about just that - boats that dont sink. Youll be stretching out beyond the confines of your original landmass into the wide unknown, founding distant new settlements and finding exotic resources. In our first run, we didnt even really check the settings properly due to a sudden lapse in competence and assumed that there were four civilisations on the planet, including our own. Reaching not only another entire continent but two new leaders was honestly kind of magical.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)This is hardly a new feature, and we ourselves have already had this happen in previous games, but that moment of barely being able to cross a chunk of deep ocean only to be greeted by two new allies/enemies took us aback more than we expected, and more than it logically should. A really lovely experience.After that is the Modern Age, where the guns and the tanks roam free. Youll be digging up relics from the past, trying to win the space race, developing weapons of mass destruction, the whole megillah. Tensions are also higher than ever, forcing even the likes of Confucius into building up armies of dive bombers because Catherine the Great suddenly lost all affection for him.In fact, lets talk about combat for a moment. It is almost certainly possible to play an entirely pacifist game should you be skilled enough, but a player who doesnt at least build a defensive force is a fool indeed. Alliances can sour quickly if you make the wrong move or dont have the right number of influence points to make right whats wrong and, as such, war if not inevitable is at least bloody likely.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)Previous games in the series had you control each unit individually, and thats sort of the same case here, except its also sort of not, thanks to the unrivalled blessing of Commanders. Commanders can carry up to four units (or six, with a promotion) and march them across the land faster and much more effectively than they could on their own. They cant fight themselves though, theyre purely a support unit.The end result is that combat and wars are substantially easier to manage and control than in previous games. Youre going to want to make use of them though, as individual units cant be promoted as before, only Commanders. Their promotion tree can make otherwise weak units far more potent than they have the right to be, guided as they are by a competent admiral/captain/head honcho. Its a shame we cant name them, as mowing down Benjamin Franklins Roman legion under the banner of the great commander Gromit would be a real point in the games favour.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)And no, that wasnt a mistake, we did say Benjamin Franklins Roman legion because leaders are no longer tied to their real-life civilisations. You can mix and match as merrily as you like, or you can keep things clean and historically accurate if you prefer, youd be missing out though, as certain combinations can produce really beneficial results, or you can pick a somewhat worse combination if youre looking for a really different run. You can even jump to the later two ages at the very start of a game if you like, skipping all that pesky need to research what rocks are good for. Its all options, and options are good.Unfortunately, the Switch version has slightly fewer options when it comes to setting up a game. Map sizes are limited to Tiny and Small, no doubt due to hardware limitations, but considering Civ 6 managed far, far larger map sizes, its disappointing that theyre not even an option here.At least there are efforts to allow crossplay for online games though, right? Right. Unfortunately, our attempts to join an online game were hampered by the fact that other platforms have already had a patch, meaning that the versions of the lobbies we tried to join were incompatible about 95% of the time. Quite irritating.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)We were able to find an appropriate game eventually, though the game immediately crashed upon loading the map. Eventually, we did get a successful match going, but getting there wasnt so much a headache as a full-blown migraine. Its a real shame, too, as playing against real people is a much more interesting experience by default.Youre likely expecting us to now detail how unstable the game is on Nintendos hybrid, but in all honesty, it was more reliable than we expected. We had a single crash mid-game in our 30-40 hours playing, although we did happen upon several other crashes at less critical moments, such as loading a saved game or linking a 2K account.More than this, were sad to report that Civilization VII doesnt really feel as finished as it should. Weve encountered numerous bugs with duplicate ghosts of units long past just standing on a tile they were once on, music constantly stuttering and cutting out, controls occasionally misbehaving causing us to perform actions we didnt want to perform, constant reminders that new resources are available to allocate when there absolutely are not any new resources at all, general UI weirdness, the list goes on. None of these are strictly game-breaking, but it's not what anyone wants to see.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)The Civlopedia should also be a slam-dunk in the games favour, an in-game resource that tells you how everything works and even provides historical information about nigh-on everything within it, but its almost impossible to navigate. Categories seem arbitrary at best, and you cant even reach the search box without using the touch screen, and even if you do manage to type something in, the actual searching appears to do nothing.And it could be so useful. This series isn't renowned for its simplicity; there are countless systems and resources to keep track of and understand, which is wonderful in its own right, but it needs to be properly explained to the player, which the Civlopedia could do so easily. There are tutorials for first-time players, but certain aspects are overexplained, and others glossed over.The Minus button is a dedicated 2K Account button, allowing you to see whos online as well as the info of anyone youre currently playing with. A sensible feature, but one that absolutely doesnt need to have a dedicated button instead of simply an entry in the pause menu. If this was used to jump to the dedicated Civlopedia page of what youre highlighting instead, it would be invaluable. As it is, its just a confusing bundle of pages.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)Yet despite all these valid criticisms, we could barely pull ourselves away from it. The UI may be wonky in places, but on Switch its much cleaner and better scaled than Civ 6s ballooned offering, particularly when docked. Gwendoline Christie's narration is a delight, the moment-to-moment gameplay and the thrill of a plan coming to fruition is deliciously rewarding, and the bitter taste of defeat successfully makes you loathe the leader that caused it rather than the game itself, which is a very difficult thing to get right.Its also brimming with wonderful little details, like a quote calling back to one of Eddie Izzards most beloved stand-up routines about flags, a memento that is a real-life stone tablet and one of the earliest examples of human writing complaining about the quality of shipment of copper, a similarly real stone with catch engraved upon it, its overwhelming fun to anyone with a love of history/prehistory/British standup.Performance on Switch is a bit mixed. Much like its predecessor, the uncapped frame rate will perform buttery smooth when zoomed right in, reaching up to the maximum of 60, but it's a fool's dream to believe you'll get this during normal gameplay. Generally you're going to expect between 20 and 30 frames a second, varying quite dramatically. Due to the game's turn-based nature this isn't a dealbreaker by any means, and aside from a few wonky models, the game manages to look rather nice, with plenty of detail when zoomed right out.