Most people who switch to games consoles from computers find it hard to adjust to the single controller, particularly for certain kinds of games.
Most of the time, this means first-person-shooter fans who find themselves reaching for a keyboard shortcut in the heat of a battle only to find it's not there.
Another kind of game that doesn't seem ideally suited to the console controller is strategy, and Civilization would appear to be a case in point. What with all the organising that you need to do in the game, a single controller simply doesn't seem to have enough buttons to do the job.
Civilization Revolution, the new incarnation of the venerable game on the Xbox 360 and other consoles, turns that wisdom on its head. The controller, it turns out, can work really well for strategy – in this case, the left stick moves your units, while the right stick navigates the map, and pop-ups and small icons indicate what each button does in each of the game modes.
Play remains the same, although it's been improved from the somewhat moribund Civilization 4. Chiefly that's because much of the city planning has been removed, so it's now simpler to keep control of your empire by building things in each city – you no longer have to actively allocate funds to science, culture and so on. That simple change makes it a faster game, and a more entertaining one, although it does put the emphasis back on war and competition with your neighbours.
That can be done on the computer or online against human players. The computer opponents are fairly easy to roll over in the lower and medium difficulty levels, but the game becomes much harder when you get to Emperor level. The only problem here is that it's a bit of a step-jump between the two, rather than a gradual increase in difficulty.
Graphics and sound, while good, are nothing to write home about, and it's annoying that you can't zoom out far enough to see the whole world, or all of a large empire, at once. But apart from that this is an excellent reworking of an old classic.
