How can something delayed so long still feel unfinished?
I will admit, I have not played the first game in the series as of yet, but I am staring at the third in my rack of computer games. So, when I read that they were going to make a Civilization game for the game-starved N-Gage system, I ordered a copy. I really think ordering a copy is the only way you can purchase this title; I have not seen it anywhere else.
The game itself is Civilization. You start in ancient times and work to improve your society by building cities, armies and technology. To can either wage war or simply defend your budding society. You have advisors and support staff to help you on your ultimate goal of moving into space. The game is something that you have to devote a great deal of time to succeed in your end goal and how quickly you meet it. But enough on what the series is, how does this version rank?
To put it simply, it does not. The N-Gage control pad/button keys make it very difficult to control the movement of just about anything on the screen. Plus, the slight viewing angle they put on the overhead map makes it very hard to tell if you are on the desired landscape square. The N-Gage's processor gets bogged down pretty easy with this game so you get lag in game play and the game is know to freeze on you. This is very frustrating if you had not saved your progress in awhile.
The graphics on the game are not too bad, I have seen better and worse. It is hard to get high detail on a screen as small as the N-Gage. The sound is pretty poor, but I keep the sound off 99% of the time anyway. The music is very repetitive and is not the best quality to begin.
In the end, I cannot recommend this game. For the extremely long delay in its release the game still looks, acts and plays like a beta test game. The end result is that the designers tried to put a game on a system that just cannot handle the software.