Civilization VII - VR Review: A Claustrophobic Take On Bringing Strategy To VR & MR

How do you justify porting a 4X strategy game to virtual reality? Unfortunately, Civilization VII VR doesn’t offer any convincing answers.

The eminence of this legendarily moreish series demands its appearance on all platforms with each new release, but the game’s existence in headset world is a strange novelty — and having played it, I'm not sure who it’s for.

Your experience with Civilization VII VR begins with a greeting from an enthusiastic tour guide, who leads you through the quibbles of this peculiar port in a lavish museum setting. Flanked by precious artefacts and statues of Machiavelli, you make an important choice — Mixed Reality or Virtual Reality?

In virtual reality, you’re planted at a circular war table, with Civilization’s famous tile-based playspace cropped into its basin. You can raise or lower the table as you see fit, as well as teleport into a side room of the museum to inspect dioramic exhibits of the relics you’ve earned in-game. Unfortunately, that is the start and end of this port’s platform-specific features. Other than that, it’s just Civilization VII in VR, warts and all.

The museum’s depressingly flat central vista will eventually make you curious about what the mixed reality experience has to offer. Thankfully, bringing the playspace into the real world is a slightly more compelling proposition. The table, and the leaders who surround it, quite neatly pop into your real-world boundary, ready for you to sit and scheme your way to glory, whether that’s through economic dominance, military might, scientific prowess or cultural hegemony.

Starting a game of Civilization VII is as intuitive in virtual reality as it is on a flatscreen device. You select your leader from a series of portraits, and just like that, an avatar of Benjamin Franklin will appear in your bedroom, his walking stick prodding the carpet with a satisfying thud. The presence of these exaggerated historic figures is impressive up close — and when they react to your surprise war or capitulate in a peace deal, they’ll gesticulate their emotions in your general direction, which is a nice boon for diplomatic immersion.

What isn’t a boon for immersion is that the leaders don’t have legs. It’s already eerie enough having these figures silently encircle you at the war table… without being able to see into their hollow chest cavities.  Their character models are grainy up close, too, which tracks with the rest of the visuals in Civilization VII VR. The textures jag into each other and look filtered through layers of crud, even if Franklin’s jowls were still admirably mottled. The material work is still quite pretty, though, with the gilding on the marble controller models sticking out as a nice touch.

The playspace in Mixed Reality is an ornate but slightly-smaller wooden table, which you can grab and move around your room or place on a raised surface. From there, you’ll point your controllers at the table’s innards for context-sensitive interactions, like zooming into a combat engagement or panning the local area for discoveries. To move, you pull the right trigger while aiming at a unit before dragging your hand to the intended hexagonal tile, which feels just as human-error-friendly as the existing right-clicking solution on PC. 

Ancillary unit interactions are situated in a little context wheel that stems from your non-dominant hand, and it’s here where you can tell a Settler to found a settlement or quickly check your resource allocations. The translated gameplay meets a very low bar, but a glaring omission is the inability to spin the table like a roulette wheel for better manoeuvrability, or better yet, cast the playspace on a wall so you aren’t constantly craning your neck trying to read the flickering text on the battlefield.

One of the most frustrating aspects of Civilization VII on PC is its Daedalian user interface, but on the Quest 3, the alternative control scheme necessitates a certain streamlining that makes it a bit more enjoyable to navigate these menus from even the most slouched of positions. And though it quickly gets tiresome, there is a charming imperatorial spirit to your inputs, like the way you tend to lean over the table and leer at your subject’s yields when deliberating about what to do with a captured city. It’s a shame everything is so ugly up close or you might risk getting caught up in some despotic role play.

By making a time-checking gesture you’ll summon the leader overview, which provides quick stings of information to let you know how you’re faring amongst your legless buddies — and inform future diplomatic efforts. A minimap is nested here which lets you tag spots to zip around the continents, which is helpful for fast travel. And while the major morsels of info you need to proceed in Civilization VII VR are typically available at your fingertips, you can also click to throw expanded interface assets like tech trees onto the walls around you for further study, which is always handy.

So you make your way through the Antiquity age, expanding civics and liaising with your fellow leaders. Civilization VII VR is admirably evocative of the flatscreen experience to begin with, especially when you have few units and settlements to manage. Building your first wonder and being transported into a showcase instance with Gwendolyn Christie’s wonderful narration overhead is a rejuvenating experience. But as is the game’s intention, complexity quickly grows, and you’re soon beset with map-spanning complications, wars on separate fronts and a dizzying field of yields emanating from your capital.

It’s here where the premise of this port falls apart, and quickly. In the Modern age, you can barely zoom out to take a look at your mighty works before the game transforms your unique units into faceless statues. And when you hone in on proceedings, the glitches and constant pop-in of downscaled textures is persistently demoralising. The wheels of my Katyusha Rocket Launchers kept jutting into a diamond shape, and my Cuirassiers were firing with finger guns, flanked by headless Cossacks. This laughable low poly battalion wouldn’t look out of place in Old School Runescape.

But if I had to pin it on any one thing, the root cause of this port’s issues is the claustrophobic playspace. It feels antithetical to the essence of the series, and there are many irritating repercussions. Arching your hands to target a specific unit in the middle of a busy siege is just one deeply tedious example. Tack on overbuilding and district management and the pace soon becomes glacial. You’ll wonder why you’re not just beaming the high-fidelity flatscreen version of Civilization VII to your headset via Virtual Desktop. 

Ironically, what makes matters worse are some of Civilization VII’s unique additions like Commanders and Attributes. These nested menu-specialization systems become arm-aching annoyances to deal with when you’re trying to make it through a crisis, or capitalise on a period of exciting warfare. And good luck getting an age or two done before your battery dies. Civilization VII VR is power hungry, and I soon resigned myself to playing plugged in.

An empire has no business being confined to a tiny table. No matter the well-animated charm of seeing a little tricorned fellow pontificating at a map in the middle of the jungle, I found no meaningful reason to play a game like Civilization VII in virtual reality, especially with this many visual and mechanical caveats.

Sid Meier's Civilization VII - VR Review: Final Verdict

One of the most beloved aspects of the Civilization series is how it makes 4X strategy accessible and unusually nice to look at, at least compared to its many bureaucratic peers in the genre. This port sacrifices both of those defining facets without any meaningful consolation. Civilization VII VR is a good enough proof of concept that is desperately in need of its own flavour. Sure, it works, but at what cost? 

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