3/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of Millennia.

I think what's frustrating about Millennia is how close to good it actually is. Old World was an almost immediate bounce off for me when it became clear what its issues were. Humankind basically never even 'clicked' for me from the start. Endless Legend is fine but all Amplitude games have 'a way' about them that you're either going to like or not like. In the pantheon of Civ-clones, there are many challengers but none come close to Sid Meier's gaming titan. Pokémon, Sims, Civ, Rollercoaster Tycoon. There are many games like them. But none are as good. And even though they have their warts that make longtime fans groan, everything else just feels like a knockoff when set against it. In some ways it's not fair for new challengers. Civ has undergone as many as 8 iterations at this point, Pokémon has an impenetrable brand value, Sims has five 'main' versions of a pretty complex and specific gameplay loop. Newcomers to these genres have to start from scratch without such experience but still maintain the same-and-better gameplay than the established industry keystones. But that's the task. One Millennia is simply not up to. But I do think it comes closer than most. Millennia doesn't upset the applecart much from the Civ formula. It doesn't try daring departures like Old World and its rif on era-changing specialties is far less radical than Humankind's. And as a result Millennia feels like the Civ you know but different. A blessing and a curse. By sticking close to the Civ formula, there's a familiarity that's very welcome. You can sit right in and get underway in a blink. That does have value, just ask Pokémon clones like Nexomon or Coromon. The new wrinkles by-in-large almost universally seem like improvements. I love the idea of resource points to upgrade tiles, or purchasing settlers with slowly accruing culture points instead of dedicating many turns of no-growth and build time like in Civ. The eras bring a tremendous refresh and upheaval to gameplay that can be welcomed eve when frustrating, such as the Age of Plagues. It's a tact that even Civ VI took with Gathering Storm. More interesting shakeups to gameplay abound. Millennia even has a more pleasing version of districts. With a select number of specific improvements that sit a bit between conventional Civ tile upgrades and miniature buildings that flash some of the sprawling district construction of Civ VI. I also enjoy the towns which create a bit of flavor to your cities/regions, mirroring (in parts) Civ VI's neighborhood district. But that's about where all the coolness stops. The game is graphically very poor. It looks like a game from 2007 at best. Which isn't a real knock for me, after all I honestly spend most of my time in Civ in the strategic view. But the performance is god awful. It gets very laggy even in early eras. Playing even medium maps with 5 AIs just seems impossible at times. The screen will jerk about and rubber band, needing seconds for the FPS to rise back up after taking turns only in Era IV. There's little excuse for it with the graphical performance. The AI is a bit abysmal. It's more board game-y than Civ even is, and that's a common complaint of Civ. If you're weaker militarily than any AI within half-the-world of you, expect wave after wave of war declarations. This is even if you have heaps of gold and alliances. The AI, even on grandmaster, will seemingly spend all of its time building units and thrusting them at your cities. Cities are pleasingly hard to take, they're often far too simple to conquer in Civ, so the AI will smash its head against your walls and defenses endlessly. Building seemingly no other buildings while they put out troops. Outlast their onslaught and they're left almost entirely useless. Having wasted an age or more on a war they couldn't win. Serving only to frustrate the player and tank their own empire. After spending 70 turns at war, they'll ask for peace, you decline and then start marching on their cities. Which will take awhile to conquer, but they're going to be very far behind. With no campaign or anything, I jumped into a couple games with large continents maps. I've put about 70+ hours into the game. Two games that went to completion (one on the default adept difficulty and one on the highest difficulty, grandmaster) and one I quit about halfway in. With a couple little false starts in between. I didn't notice much difference in difficulty between adept and grandmaster. Just the swiftness with which the AI would declare war but without any difference in how they prosecute it. On the higher difficulties they're likely to forward settle you just to send more troops but they usually can't keep up with the expense of launching so many new cities. As for the game outside of warfare, the diplomacy is painfully shallow and the thrill of building key monuments is significantly less. I do appreciate the ability to 'build all the buildings' in each city which feels rewarding like in Civ V or Civ III but there's little engagement with the map in the way of things like road construction or interesting city-state/non adversarial content. Natural wonders are far less interesting and there's basically zero cool accoutrement like the great wonder cutscenes or great works flourishes found in the Civ series. The 'progress to a new age' cutscene is cool but gets old quick. Ultimately, Millennia does a few cool things but plenty of things a bit worse. It's a near miss. But because it's a near miss and not a complete flop it grates that much more. There's a feeling of 'man this is almost fun' that makes you wanna play just enough turns before you realize you haven't been having much fun for hours. It's going to make you want to play Civ and as soon as you start up Civ you're gonna miss the one or two cool things you did really like about Millennia. But you'll press-on through your 4,000th 30 hour playthrough of a Civ game like you always do, because despite your gripes the Civ series is king for a reason. And try as they might, Civ-clones like Millennia will continue to feel like store brand versions of a superior product. Not today, Mountain Lightning. Not today.