Civ 4 is one of the best turn-based strategy games out there. It's tweaked to perfection and is an instant classic.
The graphics have never been Civilizations strongest side. The graphics in Civ 4 are very nice, but they're not extraordinary. They do what they're supposed to do, and that's basicly it. All the new movies are very good and look awesome, so the overall game ends up looking very saticfying.
The sounds are just awesome. The music is perfect, cause it's smooth and never acts anoying. The sound effects are also great though the combat effects are very basic. They don't really sound that realistic, but they are great even though. All the different leaders have different music, and the music even changes when zooming up close, and this is very cool. The music even changes after a while so that it doesn't get tedious.
Civilization IV has got a very characteristic gameplay. You start off in the year of 4000 BC with nothing more than a settler, and than you work your way researching technoligies and exploring new land until 2050 AD. The years go by very fast in the beginning, cause they obviously used a lot more time travelling and so on back then, and later on they go by one year for each turn. This works very well and makes the game go on at a pretty fast pace. One whole Civ game can take from 45 minutes to 8 hours or so, and the fact that you can't feel time blazing by is quite scary actually. Suddenly it's way after bedtime and you're still sitting there playing like crazy. The game actually features an alarm for you to activate so that you don't sit all day long!! Cool! This is actually the one bad thing about the game, cause you can't sit down with Civ 4 and except not to wipe out the whole day! Food, sleep, work-out, and friends all become irrelevent when playing Civ 4, and that's scary indeed. As you might have figured out, the gameplay in Civilization IV is amazing. You build cities and improve upon them with farms, towns and additional add-ons. The management of your cities are one of the most important things in this game. You tell your citizens where to work, hire priests and engineers, and build various buildings and units. There's a ton of things to do and the 200 pages long manual clearly punctuates this. There are six different ways of winning in Civ 4. 1: You have the most game points when you reach the year of 2050 AD. 2: You're voted world leader by the United Nations. 3: You're the first to put a man on the moon! 4: You dominate most of the map, and most of the world population. 5: You conquer the enemy. 6: Three of your cities reaches legendary culture status. All the different winning conditions are great and gives the game a good variation. The fact that the game has no campaign is quite awesome, you just start up games over and over again! I could have written 10 pages about this game cause there's so much to tell. But I'm telling you, if you like strategy games, you should really check out Civ 4.
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Fine graphics and overall presentation. A lot of different tunes that are all very nice. The gameplay is incredibly good and absorbing. All the different winning conditions. The music in the main menu is breathtaking! All the different world leaders to choose from. There's allways something to learn.
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The fact that your whole day and social life goes bye-bye!