It has truly original game mechanics, sharp artwork, an exciting multiplayer dynamic, an addictive quality, and enough flexibility to keep you coming back for more.
Gorgeous, polished, groundbreaking, and a lot of other impressive-sounding adjectives, but it's also chaotic and lacking in the precise micro-management and complex planning that endears many people to the genre.
A must-have. It's an incredibly beautiful and artistic game that manages to balance eye-candy and gameplay gimmickry with truly solid game design, all paced with perfection. [Mar 2004, p.68]
It manages to improve an already stellar game, adds a helpful and interesting stack of new features, and offers nearly as much scripted gameplay as the original title.
Perfectly captures the epic sweep of the previous games but adds a bunch of new features that improve upon an already brilliant concept. It's superior in every way to "Civilization II"—and for that matter, any game of this type in recent memory.
