Let’s hope this inspires other developers to bring more powerful games to the iPhone as well. And I said at the beginning, I’m surprised it runs on the iPhone at all, even with our praise of the massively impressive A12 Bionic processor. Considering how much is going on in Civ at times, I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
I also didn’t get a chance to see how well it plays on a phone besides the iPhone XS Max, although the requirements say you should only play it on the iPhone 7 and above.
So here’s a couple of warnings: I never got to test the local-network multiplayer mode during my time with the beta (and no, there’s no online option). I’ve been playing Civilization VI (and Civilization in general) for years now, so there’s a lot of muscle memory involved.Īlthough it’ll be kind of cool to see if you conquer the world as quickly as Alexander did. But I realized early on that I feel this way in large part because Aspyr is simplifying concepts I’m already familiar with. In some ways I like it more than the iPad version. The “Next Turn” button no longer looks as big as the moon: It sits resting in the lower right-hand corner, always at the ready but never in the way. The battery icon isn’t so intrusive anymore. Unlike on the iPad, the icons take up no more space than they need to. This version even comes with some iPhone-focused shortcuts, such as the way you can close a menu by tapping the screen with three fingers at once. If you want to see how you’re doing regarding the various victory conditions, click on your leader’s icon in the upper right. Need to find maps for resources? Press the little slider in the lower left. Once open, they look much as they do on larger screens. The civics and technology trees? You’ll find through in small, circular buttons with familiar icons in the upper-left corner. Everything else, though, is smartly in reach. The focus, rightly, is always on the map itself, which sprawls beautifully across the screen of my iPhone XS Max.
On the iPad, the changes from PC to tablet chiefly amounted to bigger buttons (and a massive battery meter), but here Aspyr significantly modified some elements while keeping them in their expected locations. This is essentially the same game you’d play on the iPad, although it comes with a few design changes to accommodate the smaller screen. In fact-and some may call this blasphemy-sometimes they seem better. Last year, though, Aspyr proved these controls work almost as well with touch-based gestures on the iPad. You spend a lot of time maneuvering over the increasingly cluttered tiled world map, and for years players assumed these graphical and interactive demands would mean Civ would remain restricted to the PC and Mac. Civilization is the quintessential “4X” game: a strategy genre focused on “Exploring, Expanding, Exploiting, and Exterminating.” Typically, Civilization and other 4X games have focused on exterminating your rivals (either with real players or through the A.I.) by military might, but Civilization VI also allows victories based on scientific or religious grounds. Macro to microīut first, an introduction. And for the most part, at least with my iPhone XS Max, I’m preferring this version over its counterparts on larger-screened devices. I can usher in great ages of science on the sidewalk to work. But that’s the little leagues compared to what I’m seeing here. If this were a game of Civ, I would have figured such a feat would have taken them a few more turns.Īfter all, it was only a little over a year ago when my jaw dropped at the sight of Civilization VI running on an iPad its complex mouse-and-keyboard controls brilliantly translated to Apple’s language of taps and swipes. While I had my attention focused elsewhere, they advanced so far down their technology tree that they managed to stuff a game as complex as Civilization VI on the iPhone and make it look as though it belonged there all along. The team at Aspyr certainly understands their Civ.