Civilization: Beyond Earth (review) is a lot like if you ordered a pizza without mushrooms, and they brought it out with mushrooms. So they bring it back out with an expansion of extra cheese and better crust and throw in some bacon bits, but those mushrooms are still on there. Make no mistake: Rising Tide enhances a lot of things, like diplomacy, exploration, and affinity choice, leaving Beyond Earth a better game than it’s ever been. It just does very little to resolve the limited replayability that is the central cause of this being a relatively weak Civilization game.

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“ The overhauled diplomacy system is the best it’s ever been in a Civ game.

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“ Artifacts work a bit like a collectible card game and can unlock some very powerful bonuses for your civ.

Rough Seas

8 IMAGES

Half & Half

“ Many Hybrid units serve interesting combat niches that didn’t exist before.

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“ Floating cities' only methods of acquiring new tiles are sailing around or purchasing hexes individually.

Diplomatic Capital can come from buildings and tile improvements, but also from making diplomatic agreements. These treaties between leaders give a bonus to the initiator of the agreement You’re required to have a web of incoming and outgoing agreements to stay in the green, which creates a system that meshes together tightly and opens up new avenues for gameplay while making diplomacy an essential cornerstone to almost any playstyle.It feels odd to criticize an expansion that does everything it set out to do really well, but the fact is that Rising Tide reinvigorated Beyond Earth for me for around four campaigns, and now that I’m through with those, I don’t know that I’ll keep it installed much longer. I think that has something to do with the fact that, like with the vanilla version of Beyond Earth, each campaign didn’t feel different enough from the last. Even with the addition of two interesting new biomes – a Hoth-esque ice world and a fiery lava-world, each of which includes its own quest chain and subtle modifications to alien behavior – I feel like I’m watching the same movie with a set change rather than a new production.That’s in comparison to the high standard of Civilization 5, where each game feels like I’m building a new story of a totally new world. Ironically, Beyond Earth lost some of that when transplanting the setting to alien planets, and the features Rising Tide adds do little to address are some of the main culprits. The story-based victory conditions, for instance, are still only exciting the first time you complete them. Aside from military Domination, the way you achieve them is basically the same every time. And moving so much of the visual flair, unique units, and feeling of technological progression into the Affinities makes it feel like there are only three versions of history to play through. The sense of seamlessly witnessing thousands of years of human progress remains painfully missing.