Brief Introduction and Caution

I was excited to buy this game, being a longtime fan of the Civilization series. I'll flat out admit that I don't own it. I was visiting a friend of mine, and installed his copy on my laptop. I figured I could kill a couple hours of boredom before I left. If I liked it, I could always buy it later.

Unfortunately, even though my laptop had adequate system resources (processor and RAM both faster and bigger than the recommended minimum standards on the box) I couldn't get past the game setup menu without the game crashing. I checked online for patches (which are available on the games official site), but they didn't help much. I then checked reviews of Civ IV on Amazon, and my suspicions were confirmed: 2K Games and Firaxis (Civ IV's publishers) basically pushed a product out months early to get in on Christmas sales. Half the reviews were people giving it 1 star, furious over spending $50 for something they can't return now, and can never get to work without forking over another $2000 for a top-of-the-line PC. Civ IV is untested garbage that was never ready for the market. I refuse to have to buy a new laptop just to play a computer game. Mine is only 2 years old, with completely up-to-date software and drivers!

The "system requirements" are complete BS. Sorry to be so negative, but with only two other reviews on here giving it thumbs up, I thought my fellow epinions consumers should be aware of this caveat.

Does the game have Potential?
The official party line indicates that this should be a great game; the changes to Civ IV were intended to streamline gameplay to reduce the time required to finish a game (I remember spending hours upon hours playing Civ II & III). Also, new conceptual additions such as world religions and city health looked like big improvements on the previous editions, which often seemed to have a few issues lacking. Dealing with opposing leaders is now more realistic, improving on the problems many had with Civ III where opposing governments seemed all to ready to cheat you and reluctant to help you despite all you had offered them before. The government interface was also improved to allow players to tweak individual aspects of their government, rather than simply picking one from a list (democracy, communism, monarchy, etc.) I was excited to play Civ IV to experience all this myself, but I guess I'll have to wait until they release a much improved version. This is all too late to help my friend, who is stuck with a $50 waste of space. Civ IV doesn't work on his laptop either, and it's only 6 months old!

Recommended: No