Civilization VII marks a new age for the 4X strategy game: a day-and-date release on consoles and PC. While the game makes the most sense on a mouse-and-keyboard setup, more and more strategy games has flirted with console releases.
And how does Civ VII plays on a big TV and a controller? It’s playable, but there’s so much more that it could have done to make the user experience be more than just adequate.
Why Not Do A Destiny Cursor?
First off, a little rant. You know how annoying some AAA games have been when it comes to their UI design? Console games that forces itself to imitate Destiny’s cursor-based interface for no good reason? It’s annoying.
What’s more annoying, are games that have interfaces designed around a mouse interface yet they persist in turning it somehow to work with just button presses. Civ VII is the latter, in that all of the UI is navigated via button presses. It’s intuitive, to a degree.
The problem with the button-based UI navigation is that it’s often hard to discern what part of the UI the game is currently highlighting. Even in the build queue where you get big rectangular boxes to scroll through, the highlight indicator only lit just a teeny bit of the big box. And how do you suppose to see that soft of a glow when it comes to smaller selectable UI like the filter toggle selections on the lense selection menu.
There’s also the problem of some menus having so, so many items to scroll through, and the only way to get to the bottom of the screen is to keep pressing down on the d-pad repeatedly. In my first playthrough of Civ VII I entirely missed all the Wonders because it’s at the bottom most part of the build queue. And now that I know that, going down there with all the button presses only to see there’s no Wonders available to build at the moment is frustrating.
If there’s a button to jump quickly to the next group in the build queue, that would be splendid. Or just let me scroll- free up one button on the trigger so you hold one trigger to scroll a menu list, and hold another to zoom in or out, instead of dedicated each trigger for zoom in and zoom out.
Another workaround is to hide all the buildables of a group, but it doesn’t collapse instantaneously so it feels impractical. Which is contrary to the rest of the UI design.
There are aspects where this cursor-less controls make sense. Like moving around the hex tiles. Being able to pinpoint the exact tile you want your units to move is nice. And having the free-panning camera at all times is nicer. Though I wish I can plop the tile cursor into the middle of the screen, like the reverse of what’s available where the camera centers back to the cursor. Moving across large bodies of water to check to select a city in the Distant Lands is annoying. Again, there is a workaround (select a city and then switch with the bumpers) but these solutions here require you to figure out a specific way to navigate the UI, rather than just do what feels the most intuitive.
It has become a pet peeve of mine that games like Football Manager 2024, Anno 1800, The Sims 4 and now Civ VII could have worked better on consoles if they figured out how to emulate the Destiny cursor and use that in tandem with select uses of direct button presses. The button-based-only solution these games offer are adequate, but not good enough.
Where’s The Sauce In The UX?
The UI doesn’t feel fun to navigate around. It lacks that sauce. Like a good plink and tat of a sound effect as you scroll quickly through the many options (the lack of feedback on button presses). The button prompt help on the lower bottom left of the screen, which is just a black slightly opaque rectangular box with no design, overlapping other interface blocks that have slightly fancier rectangular boxes. The button prompts when placed next to a button where a mouse would click on placed haphazardly and out of place.
I also have no idea if the tile yield tooltip is togglable by clicking L3 or not. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, I have to go into a different menu, exit back and go back to the actual menu which I want the tile yield to appear in order to get it appearing properly. Is it a bug or a feature I have no clue in figuring out? Either way, that’s a failure in the user experience department, both are bad outcomes.
And then there are issues that is at the core of the game itself. Some upgrade menus has you to confirm before locking in the upgrades (like picking a policy). Some don’t (like assigning points in the leader attribute).
Some requires a different button press to confirm.
You don’t get a warning if you are about to place a unique building in an existing quarter, which will lock you out of making the unique quarter. But there’s a warning when you’re placing the second unique building. Also, the first unique building isn’t highlighted so you just have to back out of the menu, check which tile has it, then confirm back where to place it.
Some menus will be greyed out and let you know why you can’t access them (like the build queue), but then some don’t get greyed out properly and have no text letting you know what’s wrong (like not being able to support an Endeavour and in the diplomacy screen—there’s no hint saying I don’t have the influence) It’s just all over the place, like a it’s all made by disparate teams (which is fine) but was not coordinated well when everything has to come together (which is likely the issue here).
And goodness me, did anyone try to navigate Civilopedia using the controller controls on consoles? It’s a travesty. Just give me a cursor for that, please I’m begging. The menu isn’t designed for button presses.
But Civilopedia isn’t the most offending UI on a controller. That crown has to go to the Trade Screen. In Civ VII, there’s a new mechanic where you can slot in resources for buffs. Problem is, you can only slot in resources at a particular time, and only to particular settlements. And moving between the left and right side of the screen without any feedback (and no prompt explaining why you can’t slot into what seems to be an empty slot) is just infuriating. And it also suffers from having many disparate small UI icons that don’t stand out enough when highlighted so you can lose track of the cursor. That menu needs more love, it is a wreck as it is right now.
Same goes to the Merchant. Upon selection, you’ll see a selection of available trade routes. But you can just select from the list of cities (ala Civ VI) during Antiquity Age. What you’re supposed to do is to manually move the Merchant to another settlement and then hit “Create Trade Route”. There was nowhere in the tutorial made mention of any of this.
The user experience team at Firaxis, which I hope there is one, needed the support and resources they’ve been begging for. Because the fans are right: the UI/UX in Civ VII is horrible right now. And it makes the console experience even worse as a result.
It Runs Well!
But there is good news. It doesn’t chug! Turn times don’t take too long! It’s probably because consoles are limited to only having eight civs maximum and Standard being the biggest map size. But it doesn’t take long until you begin your next turn, to the point that I sometimes don’t feel like I’m starting a new turn (that’s another UI issue). My multiple playthroughs reaching endgame of each of the three Ages has been smooth sailing, when it comes to waiting for the next turn. From my experience in past Civ games, that’s a great improvement.
The graphics does look a bit gimped though. I thought the game running on PC looks gorgeous but on PS5 it looks… fine. The buildings look simple, as in they retain their simple geometry but lacks the texture work and lighting quality that really makes the PC version on a good rig look good. I didn’t see a graphics option to prioritise graphics or frame-rates. But I have a feeling that the lower-end graphical options is why the game is running this smooth. Not ideal, but as a performance freak who loves those 60 FPS gameplay feel, I can live with this.
Though at launch, the game has a tendency to crash during long sessions of play, most of them triggered during the celebratory animation when you built a Wonder. Thankfully, the game autosaves at the start of each new turn, so no progress is lost from this little niggles that will surely be ironed out over time.
Should You Play Civilization VII On PS5?
You absolutely can play and enjoy a game of Civilization VII on a console, in particular the PS5. But just know that they did the bare minimum to get it playable on a controller. There’s plenty of user interface annoyances, some due to the flaws of the game’s general UI rather than from being a console port. But should you not have a PC capable of running Civ VII, and want to experience it on another platform, the console ports should suffice. But it could, should, be better.
As Civ games have a long tail of life, hopefully the developers are afforded more time and resources to get the game’s UI up to snuff. Being able to play the latest entry of a strategy game where you just want to play one more turn for hours on end on a console is amazing. But right now, you’ll have to deal with its not-good-enough user experience.
Check out our full review of Civilization VII here.
PS5 review code provided by the publisher.