Recent reviews by DanielRhymer

I'm going to preface this review by saying the I absolutely love Civ5. I've put hundreds of hours into it, and still play it fairly regularly. When people began saying that Beyond Earth was going to be a reskin of Civ5, I was actually okay with that (although for a full priced game? Maybe not for everyone, but I would've still been happy with it). The problem is that Beyond Earth is worse than Civ5. Given that it took two incredible expansions to get Civ5 to where it is now, perhaps one could say that it's excusable for Beyond Earth to be in a similar Vanilla state. No, as of right now, I have no reason to play Beyond Earth instead of more Civ5 with Brave New World.

As for my problems with the game, I'll just cover my biggest ones:
- The colors of the terrain itself are awful. There's a total of maybe four or five different shades of green, purple, and brown that get meshed up into all of the terrain features, making it often impossible to tell what kind of terrain each tile has, or if that tile contains miasma or something.

-The UI is in many ways much, much worse than Civ5. In addition it being, in my opinion, fairly unattractive to begin with, it is completely unintuative at times, in particular on the tech web where it is very difficult to tell what kinds of benefits each of the little identically colored circles are that you're unlocking. Furthermore, it seems like the changed things just to change them, which resulted in some pretty poor changes. On the city screens, the clean menus are gone and have been replaced with garbage screens that are very difficult to use.

- Trade routes are incredibly tedius, and overpowered to the point where you need to rush anything that benefits them to min/max properly.

-The late game is awful. Apart from domination, all of the victory types are glorified science victories (research this, build this, wait for this). The first game I played, I spent the last third of my game sitting and waiting for either techs to finish, or waiting for some artificial timer to finish so I could win. I ended up deleting all my trade routes so they wouldn't pop up every other turn, and hitting the auto-end turn button so the game could just finish itself, as there was nothing left for me to do. Mind you, this was over the course of about 125 turns or so.

All in all, this game might be good with expansions, but it shouldn't have to be. I don't forsee anybody playing this instead of Civ5 in a few months, and this is definitely not a game worth full price.