Should have been an expansion pack

My biggest problem with “Beyond Earth” is that it doesn’t feel like an all-new game. It feels more like an add-on to Civilization V, and that it should have been a paid expansion pack rather than a full standalone game. There are some new features which I really like, such as the radial tech tree (as opposed to linear), but not enough to make it feel like a new game.

It’s also highly confusing. Civilization games get away with a lot of what they do because we have real-world analogues to help us understand. We know that a field of wheat provides food. However it is completely unreasonable to just expect the player to know what “Biomass” does, and I’m not jumping over to the Civipedia every time I want to find out.

The game is also nearly impossible to properly strategize on your first play through. The victory conditions have several stages, or steps to them. However, you can not properly prepare for future stages because it only shows you one step at a time. Once you’ve played through it once, and you know that a certain technology is going to be required at a future stage, then you can properly strategize.

I say all this, but the bottom line is that it’s a solid game, and it seems to work well. I just feel like some unreasonable expectations are in play, such as expecting people to pay full new-game price and knowing what everything does and how it works on an alien world.

Saberus about Civilization: Beyond Earth, v1.0.1