Civilization 7 is off to a rocky start as it receives ‘Mixed’ Steam reviews from its premium backers: ‘Comparing this unfinished mess to the Civ 6 release is night and day’

Civilization 7’s full launch is still a few days away, but the strategy sequel unlocked earlier today for players who purchased its Founders edition. We’ve been especially intrigued by how this latest entry would be received by fans due to its radical shakeup of the formula. Sadly, the general response so far has been one of disappointment, albeit not for the reasons you might expect.

The game currently sits at a ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam, with just 40% of around 1,700 reviews giving it a thumbs up. This is at least an improvement over the earliest user reviews, which branded it as ‘Mostly Negative’. We anticipated Civ 7 might have its detractors due to its new Age transitions, where players are forced to change their Civilization in each of a game’s three acts. But the reviews generally seem very happy with these changes, even the negative ones. “The game’s new mechanics are pretty interesting”, writes Steam user WillNever, who gives the game a thumbs down, while similarly negative reviewer Con states that “Mechanics are fine and change is necessary and will always divide the community at the start.”

Instead, the community’s main gripe with Civ 7 appears to be the UI. WillNever writes that “The UI looks and feels like it was created in the alpha stages of development and was never refined”. While user Lathium states the interface is “unfortunately very poor here and feels ported over from console in the worst way possible.” Other problems the community point to include a limited map selection, the maximum map size being ‘Standard’, and the lack of quick move and quick combat functionality.

There are a couple of caveats worth mentioning here. These reviews are all from a specific pool of players who paid £120/$130 to play the game, and so their standards are likely to be higher than those who buy the standard edition (though at £60/$70, this still isn’t exactly cheap.) We’ll have to wait for the game to unlock fully for the full range of opinions to flood in.

That said, this isn’t the reception Firaxis would want from its most dedicated fans. Moreover, the negative reviews seem reasonable and clear-eyed compared to how Steam reviews can sometimes be. There are some stronger opinions, such as user Cool CGI Dog’s assertion that ”Comparing this unfinished mess to the Civ 6 release is night and day.” But broadly, this isn’t a bunch of people moaning that Civilization 7 isn’t the game they know and love, or overreacting to some hyper-specific feature they don’t like. If anything, its bolder swings are what they like about it the most.

We’ll have a better sense of how the community feels about Civilization 7 when the game launches properly on February 11. Our own reviewer Robert Zak found it to be a mostly successful evolution of the series, praising its Age transitions and Firaxis’ broader attempts to improve the game’s pacing, though he noted that “there’s a little too much that’s been stripped away for veterans like myself to call this meaningful progress”.