My screen may be possessed.
Swathes of vaporous pink, cadmium yellow and space-horror green commingle on a beehived planetary surface choked with futuristic cities, trans-human soldiers, alien sea dragons and orbiting satellites. Tiny colored numbers and abstruse info-panels and weird little icons frame the map. Satellites bathe the land in electric-blue funnels as radio waves pulse from sky to ground.
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth looks like a game that shouldn't exist.
Turn-based. Hex grids. Tech webs. Resource pods. Orbital layers. Intrigue levels. Virtues. Affinities. A mouthful of jargon if you don't parlez Civ.
But the Civilization games have been around longer than Doom and breathe the rarefied air of franchises that have sold more than 20 million copies. At least six million people own the last game in the series.
They're the ones who'll be relieved to hear Beyond Earth hasn't veered wildly off course---even if there's a nagging sense of manipulating the same levers and buttons with taped-over labels.
Developer Firaxis tilled interstellar ground once before with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in 1996, a riff on Civilization II that picked up where that game ended: Reach for the stars, colonize a hostile planet, integrate (or exploit) the indigenous lifeforms and fool with metaphysical gobbledygook like "sentient econometrics," "transcendent thought" and "the singularity" distilled down to abilities and modifiers that helped sculpt your passive-aggressive tromp toward victory.
Beyond Earth plays the same cards, but flaunts *Civilization V'*s DNA, which means bigger cities, slower build queues (to mitigate sprawl, since units can't stack) and maneuvering across hexes instead of orthogonal grids. Most of *Civilization V'*s initial shortcomings (like its abysmal A.I.) were finessed in its expansions, and Beyond Earth picks up a few of their better improvements, including trade routes and espionage. Other key variables just swap names: gold is now "energy," happiness is now "health," and culture is... still culture.
The startup's modestly different, too. Instead of selecting a leader, you pick a colony sponsor, colonists, spaceship, and cargo, all of which fix your initial bonuses. It's marginally more granular, but in the end more like rolling your own mix of *Civilization V'*s leader traits and perks. Then it's off to establish your colony city, which begets more cities, which beget vehicles and explorers and workers and military-industrial bric-a-brac and an in-game encyclopedia's worth of reverential sci-fi lingo.
After a few dozen turns of solo play, other factions start to land. They quickly catch up to you, a contrivance that actually feels like one: Why have the other factions start so much later if they're just going to cheat their way to parity? It does nothing for the game's fiction, and instead draws attention to the fact that the A.I. in these games never plays the same game you do.
Depending how you play, of course, the other factions matter less than the aliens. It's the early game, where they're just distant dots on the map, that is as close as Beyond Earth gets to riveting.
Instead of fending off anemic barbarian tribes, you're sharing turf with minor armies of natives. Ignore them and they'll swarm and block your growth and inevitably attack. Attack them, and you're batting a karmic hornet's nest that over time can bring the planet's collective xenomorphs (mostly bug-like, with the odd Dune worm or space-kraken tossed in) crashing down on you like an extraterrestrial hammer.
It's here the game feels the least like Civilization V, more so because you're having to jockey your explorers and workers and soldiers around in a topographical straightjacket. Miasma-saturated hexes sap unit health and take a lot of work to either clear up or figure out how to exploit. Canyons and mountains frame logjams of alien nests defended by hyper-vigilant squads of alien wolf beetles, raptor bugs, manticores and drones. Every two or three hexes there's a mess in need of cleanup or a threat that demands tackling. During this phase, you're still poring over the map like it's an interesting place to be.
On the other hand, unless you're aggressively expansionist, your interactions with other factions tend to be either feckless banter or same-ol' horse trading (diplomacy's as dull as ever, a menu of conversational levers that give little sense of the gears they're moving). There's just no time between the alien corralling game or the terraforming one to care much about what the colonist A.I.'s up to. Instead of cracking this aspect of the game open, the Cover Ops section in which you can enact subterfuge against other cities feels like busywork after the first few run-throughs, just reassigning agents to do the same things (with hip new names) that they've been doing in this series forever.
Affinities help salvage Beyond Earth from abject duplication by chaining victory conditions to different philosophical stances, which correlate with what are essentially three meta-stances that you ply by unlocking related technologies in the game's new tech web. The result, helped along by quests and the option to research new concepts nonlinearly, is a parallel trajectory with bonus-granting milestones that help distinguish what you're up to from the next group over.
But it's the long game that brings Beyond Earth crashing back to earth: Eventually, you're just banging the "next turn" button, letting the game's automated systems execute, watching the factional "processing turn" counters flip, waiting for something interesting to happen. The game tries to jazz things up by asking you to weigh in on decision forks that grant trifling bonuses, and the new Virtue system adds another bonus-granting layer that rolls out selectable strength or growth or scientific perks as your influence grows. But in the end it's just decision-grinding---shoving a vast wheel up a mountain, an inch at a time.
Here's the thing. If you missed Civilization V, Beyond Earth is probably going to seem fresh and maybe even exciting. It's the best this approach to a Civilization game is going to get. And if you play on smaller maps, you can avoid some of that endgame slog.
But it's too bad this couldn't have been a grander, bolder break from a game system we've been saddled with since 2010. We waited nearly two decades for a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri. It'll be a shame if we have to wait that long again.
