This has benefits (a flooding river or erupting volcano makes the soil around it more fertile and value once the danger has passed), but can also damage buildings and destroy units. There are now hurricanes, floods, volcanoes, tornadoes and the like that will affect your nation periodically. The final big element that has been added through this expansion is climate and climate change. It’s one I haven’t achieved yet (I can’t but help go after cultural victories when I play, because I do like to fill my nation with literature, music, and paintings), but even when you’re not running for a Diplomatic Victory, the World Congress adds another layer of strategic depth to the overall experience. So building up a big bank of those votes to ensure that you dominate the World Congress is how you can target the Diplomatic Victory. The more diplomacy points you earn in-game, the more votes you get, and once you win a certain number of votes, you win the game. Or make it more expensive to recruit military units. You might be able to make a luxury resource worthless for a while, for example. It works like a United Nations, where each nation gets votes that can either boost, or veto, other nations across a wide range of different topics. Midway through a game a World Congress event begins happening periodically. Each of these new civilizations and/or leaders bring genuinely new ways to play to the experience.īacking that up is an entirely new way to claim victory – a Diplomatic Victory. Mali, meanwhile, makes gold appear out of thin air, and there’s even a unique leader, Elanor of Aquitaine, who can lead either the French or the English. The Canadians like their weather cold, and can do things to make a civilization work in the frozen tundras that would ruin any other faction. The Maori start off on a boat with no sight of land. Superficially the first thing you’ll notice when turning the Gathering Storm expansion on (you can turn it off if you want to play a campaign without it) is that there is a bunch of new civilizations to play, and there are some wildly good ones in there. With that in mind, let’s talk about the expansion, because it is a good ‘un. That expansion was not dropped onto the Switch initially (though it is there now as well), so I’ve been able to play that for the first time on PS4. Thankfully, there is one thing I can review to make this content original – after the Switch release 2K put out an expansion, Gathering Storm, which really changed up the Civilization experience. So it’s all checks as far as port quality goes. The interface still works as beautifully on the Dualshock controller as it did on the Switch. There’s still an abominably bad loading time when first creating a campaign, but otherwise there’s no technical issues in playing Civilization VI on PS4. The problem with reviewing this game is that I’ve already reviewed the Switch port, and aside from the improved visual element, the quality of the game is much the same. I’d actually be annoyed at this if I didn’t love Civilization so much. Related reading: Our review of the game on Nintendo Switch

Civilization vi review