First reviews are in

While here in Europe we’re still waiting for the game to arrive, game reviewers have been playing the game for a couple of days and are sharing their thoughts with the rest of us. A summary:

VideoGamer is scoring the game a 9 out of 10, saying:

Being the gloomy people that we are, we’ve tried pretty hard to find something we can criticise about Colonization, but there really is very little to complain about. You could argue that the game should do more to address sensitive historical issues like slavery and spread of European diseases - but you know what? Bollocks to that. Super Mario World could do a better job of simulating the life of an Italian-American plumber, but we highly doubt it would make for better gameplay… Civilization IV: Colonization takes a classic game and updates it for 2008, without screwing around with the things that made it great in the first place. Because it does this, we like it a lot. If you like absorbing strategy games, then you probably will too.

GamesRadar awards Colonization with an 8 out of 10 (watch out, popup fest behind this link!). They note:

Some areas of questionable balancing make the late game tricky to navigate. First and foremost, the attacker seems to have a huge advantage in combat - I lost far too many battles from within heavily fortified cities, and dragoons seem to win nine out of 10 battles regardless of what unit they’re fighting and where, making a good offense your only real defense. That’s manageable against Natives and other colonies, but during the revolution with literally hundreds of enemy troops landing? Not so much. Also, once you’ve educated a few citizens in your schools, the amount of time it takes to graduate them makes it completely impractical - you’re better off just buying specialists from Europe.

CVG labels the game with a 7.9, commenting:

Once you’ve earned and built enough, your fledgling nation becomes an engine of war, desperately fighting off the vengeful forces of its European homeland. It’s a great switch, a visceral reward for all that patient tobacco trading.

Still, that battle doesn’t feel quite as thrilling as before, the fussiness of the interface and blandness of the art robbing it of some of its sense of event. What does lift this above its progenitor is multiplayer. There’s an old complaint about the original that none of the AI-controlled nations in the game are chasing independence themselves. While that’s to the benefit of making you the hero, it’s great to finally have some direct competition.

Kotaku doesn’t give scores, but they do have their own opinion of course:

Look, don’t get me wrong, there’s little that’s glaringly wrong with this version of Colonization. You’ve probably noticed most of the points above are fairly minor. If you’ve never played the original game, this is, new coat of paint aside, the same thing. Same goal, same mechanics. You’ll probably love it. But for me, a Colonization veteran, just replicating the nuts and bolts isn’t enough, and in choosing to remake the 1994 original they’re leaving this game wide open to comparison.

And, like most remakes, this is little but a facsimile of the original. It lacks the clarity of purpose, it lacks the little touches that made the original – and not this Civ IV-branded exercise – a truly unique, standalone product. If you’ve never played the original Colonization, try and track down a copy of it instead, because this feels more like a Civ IV mod than the standalone game a Colonization remake deserved.