There are few things more daunting than attempting to win a game of Civilization by way of cultural victory… except maybe trying to play a complex strategy game on the Steam Deck. And while I’m still struggling on the culture victory aspect, I can say, playing Civilization VII on my Steam Deck was far less difficult than I imagined.
In my review of Civilization VII, my biggest complaint was not really understanding some of the game’s more complex systems. The controls are a function of that misunderstanding. In playing a game as information-dense as Civilization, every function is mapped to a button, and there are a lot of functions. I tried my best to memorize it all but was grateful for the Deck’s touch-screen functionality, which let me forgo buttons in certain instances.
However, there were times when I occasionally encountered a bug where I’d click on a selection and nothing happened. It was never anything mission-critical. Sometimes the game didn’t want to register when I wanted to put a unit to sleep or ignored my attempts to establish a trade route I knew I met the criteria for. These complaints blend with my initial problems with the game’s legibility. Maybe those weren’t bugs but, rather, the game refusing an invalid action. If it was the latter, there was nothing in the game’s UI that I noticed communicating that.
I also had an issue that essentially boiled down to “out of sight, out of mind,” whereby the small size of the Steam Deck’s screen meant I sometimes lost track of my units. It’s nice that when Civilization VII prompts you to issue orders to units each turn, it’ll snap to every unit in question. But sometimes you might issue a unit to go to sleep — you want to keep it around but don’t need to issue orders every turn. With the smaller screen, I can’t see my units on a map all at once and so, embarrassingly, can forget they exist. And that can kinda suck if you need to recall your armies home to defend the motherland against literal Machiavellian assaults. (This is a silly problem, I admit, but it nevertheless happened more than once.)
I didn’t notice any significant performance issues playing on the Deck except for loading times at the start of a game or jumping back into one feeling a bit lengthy. I remember fondly how Civilization V used to chug even on adequate machines whenever the game swung back around to the top of the turn order, but that seems to have been corrected between then and now. Graphics also weren’t an issue, but I did have some instances of pop-in. I actually recall being impressed by the detail of the new fog of war system. Instead of a literal fog, unexplored portions of the map are obscured by an ornately designed map tile that features black marble inlaid with golden Roman numerals that looked particularly stunning.
With the advent of all these newfangled portable games systems and previously PC-locked games branching out onto consoles, I have been taken over by what I’m going to call desktop sloth. If I don’t have to play a game at my desk, I’m not going to, and I’m willing to accept a little bit of a degraded experience to do it. Thankfully, playing Civilization VII on my Steam Deck, with certain exceptions, didn’t feel too different from a Civ game at my desktop. Though I’m still getting the hang of game mechanics, I can still set policies, deploy armies and spies, and build up my cities just as easily from my couch as I once could my desk.
It wasn’t a frictionless experience. But the ability to take my cold war with Machiavelli on the go glossed over those minor hiccups just fine.
