For more than thirty years, the Civilization franchise has sold the fantasy of commanding an empire on the world stage. You take control of a leader and a people and you pursue the development of technology and culture. You seize land, you fight wars, and you make your way through thousands of years of simulated time in order to trace the pathways of domination and subordination. Its an old story, and the newest entry, Civilization 7, was made by a team that clearly understands that the fantasy needs a shakeup.Writing about these games is tricky because of that long franchise history. I cant assume that you and I have a shared set of knowledge about these things, and I also cant assume that we have the same kind of investments. After all, each of these games tends to be a trick mirror to the game before, replicating some of its elements, exaggerating others, and completely erasing one or two things. For that reason, I think most players of multiple Civ games end up with a clear favorite, expressed either in terms of enjoyment or play time I have played the fifth game in the series about five times as much as I have played Civ 6, for example. Im also the kind of player who dumps huge amounts of time into these games, then I take a break, then I come back, and so on. I have never had a Civ as my day-to-day game, preferring instead to obsess in marathon sessions.This is all to say that my experience with Civilization 7 during the review period was mostly long play sessions of obsession during which I spent most of my time learning the new systems rather than focusing on comparison. I think it is fresh, and it rewarded my marathon play, and I think it has its hooks into me for another few dozen hours before I put it to bed for a few weeks. If you have played previous Civ games, youll see a lot here you recognize; even if you havent played those games, I think theres a lot here to pull you in and make you interested in the fantasy that these games are selling.Civilization 7 breaks with franchise tradition in a couple ways. The first is that your leader and your civilization are unrelated to one another. At the beginning of a game, you select a leader (say, Harriet Tubman) who brings certain capabilities with them (like a bonus to espionage actions). You also select a civilization, a group of people who your leader, well, leads. If youre starting in the age of Antiquity, the oldest time period, these are civilizations like the Greeks, the Mississippians, or the Han. They are distinguished by specific traits and units that are unique to them. This whole process is inevitably a little weird to people who have played these games before, given that historically there was not a split between leaders and civs, but ultimately the vibes are the same when playing the game you simply get to mix and match your people, even if it produces extremely weird combos like Machiavelli, leader of ancient Persia.The more significant new development in Civilization 7 is the way that each game is now split into three subgames. Each corresponds to an age of world history: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. In previous games, you mostly just created a civilization and played through the game until one of three things happened: you were eliminated, you reached a victory condition, or another player reached a victory condition. The age system has created a series of subgames that makes this game quite a bit different than those. Now you play each age on its own, and they all have different tracks, or Legacy Paths, that players compete with each other in. These roughly align to the victory conditions of past games, with military, culture, science, and economic paths to completing an age.When a player completes a Legacy Path, the age ends and players proceed to the following one. In that transition, they choose what civilization their society transforms into typically, this is one that historically relates to it. For example, in my first game I played as the Han, and at the end of Antiquity I transformed my civilization into the Mongols to take into the Exploration age. This is mechanically satisfying in that it means you get to change up the gameplay of Civilization 7 a few times, and it definitely got me to play all the way through a few games that I would probably just have quit in previous franchise iterations. It also had me thinking about how weird this whole operation is in terms of playing with the figures of history; during one of my sessions I was able to complete an in-game action of securing multiple wine resources, which then allowed me to turn my Hawaiian civilization into the French when I entered the Modern era. Sometimes mechanics overwhelm the senses in a way only a computer could manage.I honestly cannot say how approachable this is for a random person who doesnt have thousands of hours put into doing these sorts of things in video games. I can say that it is very well tutorialized, and that none of the moment-to-moment gameplay was confusing or alienating to me. Civilization 7 distinguishes between cities and towns in gameplay, and there are some fiddly systems in there (towns produce resources for cities, so you have to balance how many you make of each), but I never felt lost. When I had an issue, like a citys population suddenly dropping in its happiness and falling into ruin, it was fairly easy to trace my error and suss out the problem.However, I can say that there are some age-specific gameplay pieces that produced more frustration than joy for me. It seems clear to me that Civilization 7s team took a long, hard look at competitor Humankind and tinkered with their games format in response to that game, most plainly in the civilization transformations discussed above. When I reviewed Humankind, I wrote about how mechanically complicated it was and how little I got out of the increased complexity it did not make me any happier or more fulfilled to count more beans across more game systems. Civilization 7 approaches a similar complexity with things like the religion system that takes place in the Exploration age, which (if you engage with it) asks you to constantly be producing and sending out missionaries to play tug-of-war battles for the souls of the people of the world. Similarly, there is an Indiana Jones-esque system in the Modern age that is centered on producing units, having them research artifact locations, sending them to dig those up, and then displaying them in specific buildings.In the abstract, these are wonderful systems that mean that playing toward non-war victory conditions honestly feels like you are doing something other than war by other means. In my experience, though, it simply meant that I was playing two or three different games at once, where one was a longform, comfortable, polished war game and the other was a less polished artifact hunt-em-up that I (sometimes) failed to complete before my enemies.Ultimately, Civilization 7 shines where it is already most comfortable. The diplomatic system in the game, which is what you use to manage relationships with other civs, is a pure work of art. Players generate a certain number of influence points per turn, and you use those points to both propose and reject things. If Queen Isabella wants to have a cultural exchange with me, she has to spend influence points on it. I have the option to support this exchange by spending my own influence points, and in that case we both get a big benefit to culture over the next few turns. I have the option of just agreeing but not supporting it, meaning that she gets a benefit and I get nothing. I have the option of rejecting it, spending points to prevent it from happening and blockading more diplomatic events for a few turns. These simple options, spread across a wide menu of possible positive and negative interactions, and a whole subsystem of espionage, is pure beauty to tinker with. You can bully an ally with friendship, playing to their point deficit to get a huge number of benefits; you can strategically push your luck in order to make them reject you, allowing you to gain better access to a bad relationship and a better justification for war. In every game of Civilization 7 I have played so far, I have been able to pass through the diplomacy system to improve the conditions of my Legacy Path.Civilization 7 is a game that accomplishes all of its goals in a way that feels coherent and portrays the precise franchise fantasy that it wants to. Its a fantasy that is essentially unchanged over the past 30 years there are still tech trees and a weird progress narrative of universal history, no matter how many additional civilizations are added or Frantz Fanon quotations are put into the tech unlock text box. The additions the team has made to the Civ apparatus in this game all make the world bigger and more realized than it was before, given that cultures change and morph. The civics tree, which is what allows you to gain and change social policies, is peppered with historical, culturally specific nodes that make it clear that this team is trying to make the franchise speak to real history as much as it can. Civilization is a big ship, and big ships turn real slow, so I applaud the games developers for taking some big swings and at least making some stronger forays into thinking about the long lifespan of the franchise and how it might speak to the real cultural and historical processes that it uses as gameplay fodder.I think the test of whether or not one of these games works is always the same. Does it have that gravitational pull? Do you always want one more turn? Last night, I looked down and it was 1:05 AM. I was supposed to be in bed hours ago, but I just wanted to dig up my Relics and maybe rush the cultural victory. Everything was humming along, and I could see the finish line right in front of me, especially given the fact that I was absolutely crushing Charlemagne militarily at the same time. Thats the Civ experience for me that loss of time and that chasing feeling and there I was again, wrapped up in what I was doing. Civilization 7, even if its a little rough, has me hooked.Civilization 7will be released Feb. 11 on Windows, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows using a pre-release download code provided by 2K. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can findadditional information about Polygons ethics policy here.