What would it be like if Catherine the Great ran the Roman Empire? This isn’t a question I ever would have asked, until the character selection screen of Civilization 7 led me in that direction. I don’t really gel with large-scale strategy games, and I don’t really get much out of military conflict. A culture victory sounded fun though, so I chose the combination that seemed to include the most music notes in the UI. The answer? Build a lot of stuff while nervously lining up a bunch of soldiers along my territory and hoping nobody tried to attack me.
Civilization is that series everyone refers to with the “one more turn” bit, and after spending some time with Civilization 7 on Nintendo Switch, I could see why. It’s a lot like Balatro in a way. These games dole out information at a scientifically measured clip, such that anyone with any kind of dopamine deficiency will take psychological damage simply considering putting the controller down. For someone like me, this kind of game is more dangerous than Egypt bringing a bunch of Medjay units to my doorstep and challenging me to do something about it.
My task, aside from building Wonders such as the famous Roman Coliseum, was to evaluate the experience on the Switch. 2K doesn’t have the strongest history of Switch ports, and intuitively it feels like porting a massive game like Civ 7 is a riskier proposition than something like Stray or One Piece Odyssey. But heck, if Arc System Works can make Guilty Gear Strive work like a charm on Nintendo’s aging handheld, why not this?
Turns out the result is more impressive than I expected. There were certainly compromises where I expected to see them. The graphics could look a little washed out or blurry, performance took hits at times, and of course there’s a significant lack of detail compared to the footage you’ll see embedded in Bill Lavoy’s review of the PC version. My primary concern going in was legibility though, and that’s where this port actually excelled.
Moving between playing on a monitor while capturing footage to handheld mode where I was more naturally inclined to play, I never had a problem reading text or understanding what was happening on the map. The text size even scaled automatically when I yanked the Switch out of its dock, and thanks to the deeper contrasts on the OLED screen compared to my LCD monitor, it was actually a more pleasant reading experience. Making sure the UI was crystal clear regardless of the resolution elsewhere was a crucial move, and the devs nailed it here.
My other concern was the controls, which applies to the other console versions as well, to be fair. This stuff was fine, with lots of easily-readable glyphs on the screen showing me what I should be pressing to access immediately relevant menus. The only problem is that thing a lot of modern, menu-heavy games do when they can’t decide when they want you to use the stick versus the d-pad. Having to click the right stick to close pop-ups was weird too, but otherwise I got around well enough by simply reading what was on the screen.
Performance is probably the biggest question most folks will have. The frame rate isn’t locked, which means you’ll see random parts of the game suddenly running at or close to 60, while other parts dip to under 30 depending on what’s happening. The vast majority of the time, Civilization 7 doesn’t look like it’s struggling, with one exception. Things get really unstable when it isn’t your turn. Logically, this makes sense to be the time to let compromises appear. After all, the player isn’t doing anything anyway, right? It does make keeping track of what the other civilizations are up to a pain, on top of the fog of war factor. I often found myself defocusing, then just taking the time to get my bearings once it was my turn again. That’s not ideal for a competitive, turn-based affair, but them’s the breaks in this case.
The best-case scenario for a port like this is how much it feels like a port. Are the compromises and “downgrades” so perceivable that you can tell you’re missing out, or would you not know there’s a difference until you actually sit down in front of the PC version? In the case of Civilization 7 for Nintendo Switch, it’s more of the latter than the former. Even when the performance dips some during CPU turns, or when the graphics look a bit too bright and fuzzy, I still feel like I’m playing a normal video game, and the latest in a AAA strategy series with all the bells and whistles.
Civilization 7 is available now for the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A code for the Nintendo Switch version was provided by the publisher for this article.
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replyLucas White posted a new article, Civilization 7 on Switch is a mostly stable, time-eating black hole (respectfully)
