Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword

Scenarios

Scenarios are where the expansion provides an awful lot of extra content that will leave you playing until the early hours of the morning, glancing at the clock each new turn, thinking “just one more turn and then I’ll save and be done”.

Scenarios are essentially modifications to the original game that drastically change gameplay and aesthetics to give you a completely different experience. Players are offered a variety of different modifications, some developed in-house by Firaxis and others by the modding community.

As I mentioned previously, there’s a lot of content in these extra scenarios and in some it felt as if I was playing a completely different game. Therefore, I only managed to try out a few of the copious amounts or scenarios and mods. There are a few scenarios which truly stand out as being outstanding however.

The Final Frontier is one such scenario, which does away with all the warriors, tanks, cities and original game content and replaces it with asteroid belts, star systems, black holes and space fighters. It comes with brand new tech trees, graphics and civs; so you can really see this is quite a big change. It took me quite a while to get a handle over this scenario but, once I had steered my way through the learning curve, I found it incredibly fun to play as it provided quite a different experience to the original game.


A few other scenarios I tried included Age of Ice and Afterworld, which brought in a RPG element to the game via a controllable a hero unit that you can level-up. I also tinkered around with Charlemagne, which is a battle for military supremacy in medieval Europe – drawing similar comparisons to the Medieval: Total War series, whereby you have to please the pope or emperor.

Finally, the last scenario I gave a whirl was The Road to War, which is a pre-World War II modification that sees players ploughing through three different campaigns - Pacific 1936, Europe 1936 and Europe 1939. In addition, similar to the other scenarios, it comes with a new set of units and graphics, adding a lot of extra content and gameplay time.

Graphics and Sound

There isn’t much to say about the graphics as, being an expansion, the developers haven’t drastically leaped forward from the original game. The new animations of the Civ leaders blend in so well with the original game that it would be extremely difficult to discern between if they were there in the first place or not.


Sound rolls in the same way as the graphics with no notable difference from the original game, which we wouldn’t expect from an expansion. Simply put, if you liked the original sound – you’ll have a field day in this expansion.

Conclusions

The sleek and smooth implementation of Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword blends in extremely well with the original game. So well in fact, that a lot of the time you will find yourself, as I did, believing that new elements of the gameplay have been there ever since the original Civilization IV.

The espionage system seems slightly hit and miss and I’m sure fans will continue either loving it or hating it. In fact, I reckon that the same opinion will be shared with the majority of the new major improvements, including the corporation system and random events. However, you cannot argue with variation and though you may dislike these new gameplay features, they are easy enough to ignore and balanced enough to be a powerful mechanism for victory if undertaken.

It’s easy to see that Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword brings enough content to appeal to the hardcore Civilization fans, giving them even more paths to victory and also removing the war-centric feel of the previous games. Additionally, the new content is also strong enough to bring the old fans who got bored crawling back for just a little more of this wonderful game.

Overall, the massive amount of content available in the scenarios will leave n00bs and pros alike giggling like little schoolgirls in awe. For such a cheap price as £15 in the UK, or $29.99 in the US why not, eh?