Tuesday, July 12, 2011

CivWorld Launches

Legendary game designer Sid Meier's Civilization World has landed on the shores of Facebook and begins its full-frontal assault on your precious time.

While this version is scaled down from the sweeping, epic nature of the Civ series, in the realm of casual Facebook-based games it is a monumental achievement.  Starting with a few building, players must build up their cities by increasing population counts through farming, mining nearby resources for production points, amass an army, foster a blossoming culture, and all the usual Civ-type things.

Where the game breaks out is, naturally for a Facebook game, in the social aspect.  Here players can join others online to form civilizations, pool resources, wage wars, and more.  Providing incentive to spend time in the game are positions in the government to aspire to, granting special abilities and just general bragging rights.

There is always something for you to be doing, ranging from setting up your long-term strategy to chasing around your little denizens real-time to collect production bonuses that appear occasionally over their heads.  It's a bit frustrating to figure out how to do things at first, and what needs to be tackled next, but a tutorial system guides you through the major aspects of the game as you play.

Some might scoff at the thriving casual game market, but even in its current beta form,  CivWorld joins the two hemispheres of casual drop-in drop-out gaming with more hardcore strategy play with typical Meier aplomb.

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