![]() While they’re better than FreeCiv, it’s only a marginal improvement, as they’re still very 8-bit-inspired and look like an NES game from around 1998 or so. It’s straight Civ5, with the nerfed-out bits you’d expect from not having the Gods + Kings expansion or a diplomacy track. There’s not much more to say about the gameplay than that. You almost want to fire this thing up on a Chromebook and just see how it looks. ![]() ![]() The startup screen is, again, a clone of Civ5, where you can choose your city-states, a variety of map options (including the choice of hex/rectangle for the spaces), a one-city challenge, and an online multiplayer option that I’ve never explored. Even the Advanced settings for the map are pretty numerous for a compact mobile game like this. The only victory conditions are Cultural, Domination, and Scientific, so there’s no way to take over the UN and win a diplomatic victory. The gameplay, tech tree, civ choices, units, everything – straight-up vanilla Civ5. This one is a straight-up Civ5 ripo… uh, ‘reverse engineered’ game with low-res graphics. Schtick? As above, a full 4x civ-builder on your mini-screenĪnother freeware Civ-series clone, this one is truly baffling. Look, it’s a masterful recreation of the classic early Civ games, but that’s the problem: it’s the early Civ games. And frankly, they don’t hold up that well, and when the graphics are this garish? Ouch. Who is this game for? Nostalgists, and cheapskates. That said, even nostalgic cheapskates will likely be underwhelmed by the performance of this game. And they’re on a small mobile screen that you have to be very precise about where you touch or your settler just charged an enemy phalanx. The graphics are straight outta 1997, yo. Gameplay proceeds as you’d expect from there. You can individually assign citizens to work, and set up a limited production queue. You develop the cities in the classic “fat-X” city map, and managing your city screens is just like classic Civ II. Get that first city built and start roaming the land. It’s an orthogonal square grid, so it looks ‘diamond’-shaped, like the old Civ II & III maps did. You’re opening up with some settlers and a few techs and you need to start building & expanding from there. Again, if you’ve playing Civ I or II at any point in your life, you recognize what’s going on here. It’s largely based on Civ II graphics with an underlying Civ I tech tree and politics engine, but for anyone who grew up playing the Civ-series of games, there’s nothing unfamiliar about the game or its interface. If you didn’t start playing Civ games until IV or later, you’re going to look at this one as an extra-credit project by a bunch of 6 thgraders who really needed to make up for the fact that they spent most of their computer class playing Minecraft instead of doing their schoolwork.Īs you’re starting up, you get the traditional ‘pick your civilization’ screen. You do the math.įreeCiv is one of the original ‘reverse-engineered’ Civ games that snuck out into the public domain. Schtick? Play a full 4x civ-builder in the palm of your hand.Ĭost? I mean, it’s called FreeCiv. These games were all tested on a Pixel 2, and an 8-in Samsung Tab A. Some of these are not on iOS, as Apple’s more restrictive app store rules will weed out several of these ‘clones’ – especially the ‘free’ ones that are pretty blatant rip-offs. Note that these were tested on Android devices, but some also exist on iOS, and they are functionally identical. With the ginormous increases in computing power available in the palm of your hand these days, there’s finally a capability of playing a real 4X game on a mobile device. There are a bunch of options, each with different reasons to pick them up. ![]()
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