Civilization VII VR Revisited – Just One More Year

TL;DR for Civilization VII – VR, an update review one year on from the game’s VR launch.
(played on a Meta Quest 3 128 GB model)

Pros	Cons
+ Great core mechanics	– Not enough information
+ Beautiful music	– Major bugs persist
+ Stability issues fixed

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One year after the release of Civilization VII’s VR port, we at Auganix thought we should go back and see just how many of its vast and hideous flaws have—or haven’t—been dealt with.

Now, seeing as this is a follow-up review that specifically builds off of the original, I highly recommend you go and check that out first!

The PC and VR ports of Civ VII were made by two different studios: The PC port was made by its natural home studio, Firaxis Games. While the VR port was made by Playside Studios, out of Australia.
While doing my homework, I noticed that since Civ VII released on the Meta Quest it has received four patches.
But in that same time, Civ VII on PC has received a whopping fifteen patches…
Oh boy…

Even just skimming the PC patch notes, it’s clear that they’ve added and updated a lot of content that simply is nowhere to be found on VR: new units, new civs, changes to mechanics, new maps with larger map sizes.
Tons of new variety and QoL updates—for free—packed into Firaxis’ flagship AAA title.

Meanwhile, all four of Civ VR’s patches have just been maintenance: bug fixes, UI legibility, stability improvements, and so on.
Unfortunately—even one year in and with all of its patches devoted to getting this clanking jalopy roadsafe—Civ VII in VR is still buggy; not totally broken anymore, but still too buggy where it counts.

In my first experience with the game, I encountered a near constant slew of crashes and bugs that forced resets. On average I could probably go about twenty-five minutes or so without some infuriating interruption.
Thankfully, I can say that this time I experienced no such thing!
Not once was I forced out of the game by its own instability!

Now something critical:
Either it’s been an entire year and Playside still hasn’t managed to deal with the core issue of tile yields zooming off every which way from the icons they’re supposed to sit with, or they just decided that instead of fifteen patches worth of content they’d just let you keep this cool mini-game!

Step right up! Try to make an informed decision! Ha-ha!
Come catch the amazing flying numerals! Line up the yields and win a prize!
That’s right, win big and your sweetheart gets a three-foot teddy!
Lose and get a stream of suboptimal best guesses that slowly and consistently tank your eighteen hour playthrough!
That’ll be sixty American dollars!

Of course, as long as you know the optimal terrain and adjacency for each building’s resource type, then you can still make pretty solid districting choices without having to read the exact yields, so maybe it’s not such a big deal?

Except, they still haven’t added a Civilopedia.
You know what that means?

That means that—other than leaving the tutorial on, and swiping away the vast majority of its pop-ups—there’s still no in-game place to get information aside from the one or two sentences sprinkled about build menus and tech trees:
No way to remind yourself what the wonder you built some hours ago actually does (if it’s from a previous age then you can’t even go scouring the tech trees node-by-node).
No way to cycle between units.
No overlays or legends for the minimap.
No way to take inventory of what buildings are in your city, whatsoever, except by negating what’s still available in the build menu.
There’s still no way to even look at the basic types of building/terrain adjacency information.

So of course—one year out—Civ VII VR should be quite bad.
I should, quite easily, not recommend it.

But the thing is…
The core gameplay is still pretty tight.

And while the game itself deeply lacks necessary information, it’s stable enough now that you can just pop open another window and use a real search engine instead of an in-game one.

Literally just go look up the details of whatever crucial mechanic Playside neglected to explain, come back, and you’re gold!
The difference between an in-game block of text to read and an out-of-game one is basically only aesthetic; you lose the music for a bit and pause immersion.
And sure, needing to DuckDuckGo your way to proficiency isn’t ideal (or, arguably, even in the scope of the game that I’m reviewing per se) but it’s not the first time—and won’t be the last—that a gamer looking to optimize their strategy is forced to the internet for answers.

It’s just that this time it’s less that you need to go study to ‘optimize’, and more that you need to go study to reach any competency beyond ‘hoping for the best on Governor difficulty.’

Look.
At the end of the day it’s a game.
And it’s a game that I would genuinely like to be playing now instead of writing this.
That alone is a continental step up from last year.

But getting there required some creative working around still-glaring problems; problems which either wildly obfuscate, or simply fail to deliver, critical strategic information.
This, in a game whose whole experience can be accurately described as critically optimizing strategic information.

So Civ in VR is fun and immersive and annoying and is receiving drastically less love post-release than its PC counterpart.

But—one year on from its VR debut—do I recommend it?

Well no, probably not. At least not for most people.

I think the idea of playing in VR specifically has to be such an important part of your preferred gaming experience to justify spending the same AAA money on a buggy port of a good game with worse graphics and a likely ever-widening content gap.

But Auganix didn’t buy me a copy of Civ VII on Steam.
So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go put on my Quest and play just one more turn.

Yes, despite all its hiccups and required workarounds, one year later, Civilization VII on the Meta Quest bumps it score up to 6/10.

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Hyper-Objective Omniscient Evaluation Yardstick (H.O.O.E.Y.)

Scores are out of 10, where 10 is a masterpiece, 1 is unplayable, and 5 is just average.
Gameplay has a heavier weighting toward the overall score.

Gameplay – 6
Graphics – 7
Immersion – 4
Replayability – 5
Performance – 4
Sound – 8

Image / video credit: Sid Meier’s Civilization VII / Auganix

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