This computer game from 2014 was the successor to both Civilization V (released 2010) as well as the spiritual successor to the greatest computer strategy game of all time, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (released 1999, and usually known simply as Alpha Centauri). Civilization: Beyond Earth (or just Beyond Earth for short) suffers when compared to either of these older games, as it seems the makers could not improve on what had come before in some very important respects.
With 15 years elapsed since Alpha Centauri came out, it is no surprise that the mechanics of Beyond Earth are an improvement over it. Although some might argue that certain mechanics were backwards steps, I for one am glad to leave the days of increasingly tedious sprawling empire management and stacked armies of doom in the past - and if you do prefer that, the older games are still there for you.
However, there are three key areas in which Beyond Earth compares unfavourably with its immediate predecessor, Civ V, and these are much less understandable mistaiks considering how similar the engines behind the two games are.
The first and most significant issue with the game mechanics that makes Beyond Earth less fun for me to play is how the game has no option for reducing the abundance of native aliens. The aliens fill an important part in the setting of Beyond Earth, but mechanically they fill much the same role as barbarians do in Earth-set Civilization games, and Civ V had a nice, easy option for a player to turn the barbarians off (or turn them up, if so desired).
I'm not even sure turning the aliens off completely would be necessary, but the game could definitely have done with a way of turning their rate of spawning down, because I found so many games were made much less enjoyable by my early exploration of the planet being blocked by aliens and their nests, in addition to the mountains and canyons (twice as many terrain types as in Civ V) which already block movement.
Secondly, the actual moment of winning a game feels much less satisfying than in Civ V. In Beyond Earth, you see a victory screen, and then have the choice of exiting or to keep on (pointlessly) playing. But with Civ V, as well as these options you can also see your score and how well you rank compared with the other civilisations in the game or with famous leaders from history, and also watch a replay. These may not seem like much, but I think they add a lot to the gaming experience. Your final score is then entered into the 'Hall of Fame' where you can see how your score ranks against those from other playthroughs. Beyond Earth is also supposed to have one of these, but (at least in my copy) it has always been borked with no scores recorded.
The third problem is with the Wonders/Secret Projects. Or rather it is really two problems in one, since either of these individually would not be nearly so detrimental to the game as they are with both problems together. In Civ V the Wonders are (with a few exceptions) well balanced, powerful enough to be worth the significant investment of resources it takes to build them without being game-breakingly good in the way some Wonders from earlier Civilization games were. In Beyond Earth not only are most of the Wonders underpowered compared to their build cost, but also they require you to research optional "branch" technologies in order to build them at all - the combined opportunity cost in both science and production is too high for many of the Wonders to ever be worthwhile attempting.
In spite of all I have just said, these mechanical issues are not enough to prevent the game from being fun to play on the whole - my first objection about the aliens is the only one that can really ruin a game, and that only occasionally (albeit randomly). Where the game really lets itself down is in the setting or 'flavour' elements. A failure in flavour may not affect the game mechanics, but it certainly affects the game-play experience.
There are three key areas where Beyond Earth failed to live up to comparison with the flavour of Alpha Centauri - the benchmark against which its setting was always going to be measured, much more so than against Civ V, since they are the two sci-fi incarnations of Civilization, and by 2014 Alpha Centauri had already achieved the status of a classic, All-Time-Great computer game.
Of crucial importance to the setting are the main characters and factions in the game. Alpha Centauri from the very first got this absolutely right, with all seven of its original factions (and their leaders) being iconic, and the seven from its expansion only marginally less so. Beyond Earth made the mistaik of not wanting to give its factions strong identities, so that the player could shape their own character during play by their choice of in-game Affinities. But the result of this was that the main characters were all left bland, with little (though not nothing, to be fair) to distinguish between them.
Alpha Centauri also had the faction leaders' personalities woven throughout the game, with their dialogue giving flavour to the researching of new technologies, the building of new... er, buildings, and the completion of Secret Projects. The voice acting of each of these leaders brought them to life, which leads me to the second of the ways in which Beyond Earth failed - despite also having quotations from the various faction leaders accompanying its technology breakthroughs, buildings, Wonders, and even Affinity levels, they were all read out by the same voice actor.
Having a single actor doing all the voiceovers worked well in the historical Civilization games (whether read by a famous actor such as Leonard Nimoy or Sean Bean, or not) because they were quotations from historical figures who, pretty much by definition, carry more real-world weight than the fictional characters invented for the sci-fi setting, who need all the help they can get to be brought to life. Having a single actor do all their voiceovers robs them of distinctiveness and makes them all blend together.
What makes this an even more baffling decision by the game's makers is that they did employ multiple voice actors to play the different characters - for their diplomacy screens only!
The third and final flavour issue is, as with the mechanics, the Wonders. Alpha Centauri had short animated movies to accompany the completion of each of its Secret Projects, several of which were among the most iconic parts of the game. Civ V didn't manage to have movies to go with its Wonders (I don't know why not), but at least it had appropriately memorable still images in their place - Chichen Itza is a personal favourite of mine, for example.
Beyond Earth cannot even manage that. The pictures are all very similar, depicting the blueprints of fictional buildings that don't even give you much, if any, indication as to what the Wonder actually does. In Alpha Centauri or Civ V you get a sense of triumph when you complete a Wonder. With Beyond Earth, the sense you get is more like that of disappointment.
My hope for the future is that one day we will get a Beyond Earth 2 that can somehow keep the many genuinely good elements of Beyond Earth's gameplay while at the same time improving upon the areas of weakness I have described here. For all that Alpha Centauri casts a long shadow over the genre, it would not need to slavishly copy the setting in order to be good... if it did, it would be more like Alpha Centauri 2.
Actually, now I've said it, that sounds like an even better idea...
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