Alot of potential but spoiled by bad ai. The more you play the worse it gets.
Mainly because its a form of strategy game on a console which is not something that happens often anymore. I went out on day of release and got it from my local game shop for £40 which unfortunatly turned out to be a waste.
I expect the game to get good reviews as you dont notice alot of the things wrong with it until you have played it for a while
The core gameplay and graphics are decent. Its fairly in depth but not so much as the PC games, the graphics look really nice and the combat plays out in a detailed way keeping you unsure of who will win until the last man has died.
There is alot to do in the game or atleast it makes you think there is by putting icons all over every difficulty and every civ that you can turn to gold by winning a game with one of the four victory conditions. there is also a big hall full of statues & paintings that you get for defeating each race on each difficulty, the trophy will improve its color as the difficulty ramps up, for example killing the brits on lowest difficulty will give a dull colored statue but beat them on higher difficultys and its replaced with a gold one. One annoyance here is that the enemy civs are always random its possible to never meet a civ in 15+ games and not receive the statue. If i was trying to fill the hall on the harder difficultys i would be very annoyed after a while considering how long the games can take to win.
Overall though this is all cosmetic and you gain nothing from filling the hall but it gives you something to keep replaying it for.
Here comes the problems with this game and there is some big ones. One of the best parts of civ was diplomacy and in this game it means nothing. When you encounter another civ they will usually make peace but just for a limited amount of time they will always attack you eventually, and the worst part is that the ai civs all act as 1 team they never ever attack each other. the only way to force enemy civs to attack each other is by bribing them using diplomacy but this is often unavailable because they will tell you the enemy civ is too powerful to go to war with leaving you stuck on your own.
You will find 3-4 enemy civs attacking you at once from multiple directions in pretty much every game and causing great annoyance.
Its obvious the ai is very poor when you are close to victory with economy/tech/culture. All the ai civs will go all out war on you and try to stop you from winning which makes sense however, when an ai civ is about to win they dont react and carry on as normal just attacking you only.
At the lower difficultys this is fine but as you try the top 2 difficultys it becomes ridiculous, the only hope of winning a game is too completely turtle from start to end having a few citys, and this leads to another big problem defending.
Defending citys is way too easy in this game and unbalanced. the basic ranged troops of each age have very high defense and nothing can compare to them in attack. You will have walls on all your citys which double defense, combine this with a couple of upgrades from kills that will more than double defense again, you can then leave a fleet of ships at the side of your city and will usually have a defensive general due to the ai sending waves of weaker units in to die. This leads to invincible citys and makes the game become very tedious. All my games at the higher difficultys were won by turtling i saw no way to win by being offensive as all the ai civs gang up on you.
My game has frozen a few times also, 1 very noticeable bug is when you have a naval battle at the north and south of the worldmap, the camera will zoom in to the battle but will get stuck someone showing you a clouded north/south pole and forcing you to reboot. Its frozen at other random times for me also which for a long game is very annoying especially if you were close to winning after 1-1.5 hours. Luckily it reminds you to save after each age so sometimes you might not have to start over.
i didnt play it online as i like to take my time on these sort of games and it seemed too long for multiplayer i could imagine alot of impatient people just quiting halfway through games and ruining it. People cant handle spectating on gta cops and crooks for 2 minutes, imagine them in a 1-2 hour game.
Overall the game has alot of potential and could of been great, If the game is patched making defensive units nerfed plus an ai fix it would be a great game but until then i just dont find it that fun to play.