Millennia Review: One For The History Books
Over the last few years, there’s been a push in the strategy game space to create a real competitor for Sid Meier’s Civilization. Civ is one of the rare franchises – alongside Pokémon and The Sims – that not only created and popularized its own genre, but has remained the unchallenged monolith of that genre for decades, and improving on the formula has become a white whale for developers. First, there was Hooded Horse’s excellent Old World in 2020; then came 2021’s Humankind, which brought fresh ideas and approaches. C Prompt Studios’ Millennia, out this week, takes some of the best parts of all these titles and refines them in an intricate, marvelously designed 4X experience.
Like Civilization, Millennia puts you in charge of a nascent Stone Age culture and tasks you with guiding them through all of human history. You might lead a warmongering empire, a beacon of learning, a financial titan, or even all three and more. As such, the core gameplay loop should be immediately familiar to the game’s intended audience.
Millennia’s core mechanic, which sets it apart from Civ and its fellow pretenders to the throne, is how it handles the progression of the world through history. Campaigns are divided into Ages, much like the Eras of Civilization and Humankind; progressing from one Age to another unlocks new technologies, opportunities, and challenges. Millennia introduces the concept of Variant Ages, where the world can progress into alternate timelines, for better or for worse.
For example, moving from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age will, in most games, play out as it did historically; new metallurgical and construction techniques allow for a greater quality of life than people have ever seen before, while rulers try to turn those same advances to military and financial gain for themselves. However, if a single nation sends adventurers far and wide in the Bronze Age, returning with tales of far-off lands, the Iron Age can instead become the Age of Heroes. In this timeline, myths and legends are real, and heroes like Achilles and Sun Wukong can be recruited to seek out quests on the map, earning rewards for their homeland.
By the same token, if the Bronze Age sees aggressive wars between cultures, the Iron Age could devolve into the Age of Blood. Everyone is locked into war with everyone else, and is incentivized to seek battle for battle’s sake. It’s a barbarous world straight out of Conan, but offers a chance at early conquest with powerful units like Berserkers who would otherwise be unavailable.
Millennia offers similar what-if scenarios for every Age that follows, letting players create steampunk utopias or dark periods of religious fanaticism. Combined with National Spirits, a mechanic similar to Humankind’s Culture draft where players choose perk trees as they progress, it allows you to create exciting new worlds each time you play. The endgame could be a future where humanity unites under the enlightened leadership of a diplomatic power, obliterates one another with orbital laser arrays, or even finds themselves forced to stand together against a malevolent AI of their own creation.
Even winning the game is built around the Ages system. A player who establishes themselves as a major player at the right time in history – a Genghis Khan-like conqueror in the Middle Ages, for example – can trigger a Victory Age, announcing their intention to win via a goal specific to the period. If our Medieval conqueror can eliminate a third of their rivals and have an army twice the size of the next-largest competitor by the end of the Renaissance (or rather, the Age of Conquest), they claim the win then and there. Alternately, you might try to bring the world under your religion during the Enlightenment, triggering the Age of Harmony and winning by converting two-thirds of the global population.
Unlike Civilization, there are no unique units or buildings, nor are there nation-specific powers in Millennia. Every ability that your culture gains comes from the decisions that you make along the way. While this does make the early game less flavorful than Civ, since there’s nothing to really differentiate Russia from Persia or the Aztec Empire, the result is more impactful decision points at every stage of the game.
Millennia is clearly designed with hardcore strategy gamers in mind; while its gameplay is rock-solid, it has a steep learning curve and little in the way of tutorials beyond a wall of text when a new mechanic is encountered for the first time. While it certainly has me falling into the endless loop of “one more turn,” the game lacks Civilization’s infectious charm. Cities all look the same regardless of culture or National Spirit, and the combat animations use stiff, bare-bones models to show the results of your military misadventures.
Millennia’s biggest weakness is its user interface. Tiny text and unit symbols force me to strain my eyes when assessing an upcoming battle, and it took me a full hour of gameplay to notice that my reserve of Improvement Points – a critical resource – is displayed in a microscopic box at the lower-left of the screen, away from any other information. Pop-up alerts are also small, to the point where they’re easy to miss entirely – hardly ideal when a city is a turn away from rebelling.
Despite its flaws, though, Millennia’s gameplay is compelling enough to keep me coming back. It’s better than Humankind (which I say as an unapologetic Amplitude fanboy), and on par with Old World, but it doesn’t quite dethrone Civilization. However, its introduction and implementation of new takes on genre staples puts the ball in Firaxis’ court.
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Millennia
Reviewed on PC
Millennia is a 4X strategy game from C Prompt Games and Paradox Interactive in which you play over the course of 10,000 years, taking the fledgling humanity into the near future.
- Released
- March 26, 2024
- Developer(s)
- C Prompt Games
- Genre(s)
- 4X , Turn-Based Strategy , Simulation
- Engine
- Unity
- ESRB
- PEGI: 12 (Violence, Bad Language, In-Game Purchases)
- Engrossing 4X gameplay
- Deep, emergent faction customization and narrative
- Fresh takes on a classic genre
- Steep learning curve
- UI and graphics don’t rise to the same level as gameplay
Read original article here: www.thegamer.com
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