This game requires the Rising Tides DLC to be truly worthwhile. It can be fun without it too, but it depends a lot on your expectations and how much you're ready to spend on a game for hours played. The AI/politics play in this Civ titles is very lukewarm compared to the main series, and while the victory conditions are somewhat less varied due to being mostly tied to the affinity system, they are better designed than in any of the main series games in my opinion. Other than that it's basically Civilization V without any of its gameplay perks like interesting and unique leader abilities, or great design of technology and social policy progression.

The DLC makes Beyond Earth stand out as a full-fledged Civ spin-off with its own unique diplomacy system, quest system (better than both Civ IV random events or Civ V city-state questing) and innovative naval play. If you already own this game or are able to find it with a great discount, I recommend only playing it when you can find the Rising Tide DLC with slightly reduced price tag. The vanilla Beyond Earth is not worth 40€.

tl;dr: Buy Rising Tide if you own this game. Skip if you don't.

I came back to Beyond Earth after a long time away and I wish I hadn't. Hours of my life I'll never get back.

The bottom line is that this game is a total failure of imagination. It's a simplified conversion of Civ 5, with its systems dumbed down, its graphics homogenized, and its tech tree replaced with a web filled with Star Trek technobabble.

Ultimately the simplification of Civ 5 to make Beyond Earth is a very minor concern compared to the elephants in the room. It plays like its older sibling. It's systems are slightly modified, some for the better, some for the worse, but ultimately the actual gameplay of Beyond Earth is fine, or at least not worth criticizing.

But ugh, the writing and the graphic design.

The technobabble is the worst part. Few of the technologies, buildings, or wonders make any sense. This is a major problem in a Civ game, because they are what makes a Civ feel like you are accomplishing something and not just mashing buttons and wasting hours upon hours of your life. Researching Literacy and building Libraries and eventually a Great Library resonates with players. We all know what that means and what impact it is likely to have on our civilization, and that makes us feel like we're getting somewhere.

But researching Protogenetics or building a Gaian Well leaves you hanging in a very real way. What does a Tectonic Anvil do? Why do I want one? How does it help me? What does it even look like? The new web-like tech tree gives players a lot more choice in how they develop their civilization, but the choice feels meaningless because it has no emotional weight. I'm reminded of the famous debacle over Mass Effect 3: "Pick a color for your ending." There's no green in Beyond Earth, they made it yellow instead.

I realize that this might seem like I am picking nits, but I'm not the only person who has noticed this effect. Read a few other negative reviews, even professional ones, and you'll see the same concerns. A tech tree full of meaningless jargon really undermines a lot of what makes a Civ game feel satisfying.

The technobabble is particualrly unforgivable, in my opinion, because I've always felt like Civ has a mild educational tone. But some of these things in Beyond Earth have names that players might mistake for real-world science, and they are not only fictional but are active misinterpretations and misrepresentations of important scientific concepts. All of the science in this game is garbage.

I wouldn't criticize most video games on this point, but I held Civ to a higher standard. It's like Firaxis made no effort at all to create a believable fiction around this nonsense. Here are two of my favorite quotes:

"However, if we reverse the polarity, it will decrease the ultrasonic circumference, allowing the fence to become mobile..."

What?

"Bionics are part of the future, this we cannot ignore. If we ignore it, it will consume us."

WHAT? Also, serious negative points for grammar and composition, Firaxis.

...There's a real winner in almost every paragraph.

The game has three graphical tilesets (four with the expansion), which seems like an upgrade from Civ 5's "boring" Earth tileset, except that they're actually all the same tileset, just palette-swapped. What's worse is that the predominant color of the palette is pervasive, like a universal color filter, so it is impossible to tell anything from anything else, whether it is a hill, a desert, tundra, or a flood plain. Again, the expansion tileset is better about this but they didn't fix the other three.

The game's approach to color overall is a disaster. The alien species that overrun the map have green icons when they're calm and pass through yellow to red as they become more agitated. Whoever thought this was a good idea needs to go back to interface design school. What's more, many aliens share the global palette, so they blend right into the scenery. On a similar note, the game's tech tree is so samey that someone actually wrote a mod that does nothing else but better differentiate the icons in the tree. This casual disregard for player understanding is everywhere in Beyond Earth.

I really wanted to like Beyond Earth, but even after all this time, Civilization: Alpha Centauri is still the superior game. If you're looking for a more modern experience, also consider Endless Legend. Civ 5 is perfectly serviceable if you're not married to the sci-fi theme, and Civ 6 is right around the corner. But Beyond Earth is one to skip, unless you are a truly rabid fan of the genre, and Civ in particular.


POSTSCRIPT FOR THE BENEFIT OF MY FELLOW MOLECULAR BIOLOGISTS:

"Upon the discovery of retroviruses and reverse transcriptase, research accelerated phenomenally and in short order introns were unlocked, giving scientists the ability to engage in RNA splicing, the first step in the field of protogenetics. In RNA splicing, the introns are removed and exons joined – genetic engineering at its most basic level. Since RNA conveys the genetic information that directs the catalytic biologic reactions at the cellular level, modifying these can dramatically alter the function and/or operation of an organism. While some colonial geneticists focused on the DNA strands in efforts to engineer new species, others sought instead to modify the already existing ones through protogenetic RNA manipulation."

Ugh. Just... ugh.

I had heard a lot of complaints about this game and when it was on sale for about $20 including the DLC I picked it up due to my cousin having already bought it when it first came out and he gave it a thumbs up so I bought it.

This game may be my favorite Civ game to date, but having only played Civs 3-5 I'll let you guys be the judge of my experience. That may be considered blasphamy, but I really enjoy this game. I do enjoy Sci-Fi more than fantasy/medieval type of games though so I fully admit some bias here.

I really liked the tech tree (sorry tech web), in this one. The web feels daunting at first, yet I enjoy it better than the other Civs. Mostly because it feels like, no matter what path you choose you don't feel hopelessly outgunned in terms of technology advancement. Whenever I would play the other ones, if I did it on any higher difficulty level I always felt like my Civilization just figured out gun powder while my cpu compatriots just spliced the atom when I played Civs 3-5. So maybe I'm just bad at the games. But the tech web makes me feel like everyone is close to the same level so you can forge your own path without being left behind because you didn't research a certain tech first and thusly you are way behind. If you really enjoy Civ 5's tech tree this one could be a bit off putting.

I also felt like the game wasn't a drag, you had plenty of places to explore, things you were working toward, but it didn't feel overwhelming. Maybe Beyond Earth is a bit simpler in that respect, but I personally found that nice. The AI and companies/civilizations aren't as memorable unfortunately but in a way I also kind of like that better too. You're an unknown face facing the unknown world leading your people to (hopefully) victory. I guess I can put myself into the game better than playing as Bismark or etc...

I can see the complaints about it being a Civ 5 mod, but the different tech tree/web, the different starting options, and some of the mechanics make me think their complaints are a bit...nit-picky.

Anyhow, if you like the other 5 Civ games, and they way work this one may not be as deep or game-changing as you'd expect. But if you'd like to try something Civ-like but a little different, pick it up on sale.

For you youngins, this game was meant to be a spiritual successor to a game known as Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is still an incredible game worth checking out by the way (and that's where the problems begin). This game gets a thumbs down not only for not being able to live up to its progenitor, but also because it fails to live up to its real parent, Civ 5.

Why it doesn't live up to Alpha Centauri:
Alpha Centauri had a functional elevation system, you can even change elevations through terraforming later in the game.
Alpha Centauri had a more robust troop customization system. Units were 'Chassis' that you could add 4 components to making for thousands of potential combos.
Alpha Centauri had a virtues and ethics system that made a little more sense. Rather than pure unlock bonuses, various political philosophies had benifits and drawbacks and colored the ideology of your civ.
The aliens in Alpha Centauri are an actual threat, not only that but their difficulty and agression scales with the progression of the humans based on a pollution mechanic.

Why it doesn't live up to Civ 5:
People have made too big of a deal out of this, but Civ 5 feels more immersive or rather the context is more relatable due to the history. There is always going to be something amusing about Jewish Germans allying Poland that BE will never replicate. That said the personalities, techs and designs of all the civs are so super boring in BE it really made this problem stand out.
The AI seems significantly dumber to me. I had to raise the difficulty higher to get the same level of challenge in BE. This makes no sense to me because Civ is always going to be a much more popular and mainstream game, BE should be MORE challenging not less, for people who love civ and want more.
By far the weirdest problem that BE has vs Civ is the fact that in Civ each type of point you acquire (aside perhaps from strategic resources) has a lot of utility. If you go science, culture, military, money, these resources are always useful and put you on a path to winning the game. Civ is interesting because of the way these different resources can interact. You can leverage your science to focus on culture for example, and this was expanded and refined in the expansions. In BE however there are a number of resources that just plain max out and become useless. Health can't benifit more than a certain cap (unlike hapiness in civ) and the capital resource becomes more useless even though you get exponentially more as the game goes on.

Final Thoughts: What went wrong? I think when it comes to failing as a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, this game showed a failure of imagination to look at how to take the creative aspects of that game and bring them into the new Civ formula. It looks like they didn't even bother trying to be faithful to the source material in a lot of key areas, including the aliens and pollution, the elevation mechanics, the ethics system, and most importantly unit customization. It seems whenever they had the opportunity they chose to err on the side of Civ 5 and that resulted in basically everyone agreeing this game was a bad reskin. They aren't wrong.

The more curious question is, if all deference was given to civ 5 how could they possibly fail in that regard? Really the only explanation I can come up with is the Civ formula of expantion packs. Whether it was an intrinsic part of the design plan to wait on developing certain content for expantions, Firaxis genuinely needs more money, time, and player feedback to develop the game further, the designers have gotten complacent in their ability to deliver a half-finished product that can ultimately be fixed through expansions. Players had no patience for this in BE because Alpha Centauri and Civ 5 both already exist and boast a number of features BE clearly just didn't have. I think Firaxis was planning on weathering this criticism like it did with the civ series and hoping that it would iron out the flaws, however with critics panning it, fans hating it, and new people seeing all the negative reviews on the basegame won't even consider buying and expanding it. Their gambit failed and after one expansion it looks like Firaxis won't be speaking about BE again.

At the core, this is Civ series set in the future. If you are a fan of Civilization, and seriously, who isn't, then you can't really dislike this game. It contains enough of the familiar Civ concepts with some newer nuances to make it an enjoyable experience.

10/10

I wish I could like beyond earth, I really do. it's conceptually ambitious, attempting to stray into territory uncharted by the civilization series and the realm of gaming as a whole. but the game's many attempts at moral depth and player freedom -- the tech web, affinities, virtues, veterancy -- leave the player stranded in a kiddie pool of directionless monotony.

I hate to say it, but the game's touted tech web is chiefly to blame here. with such an overwhelming number of options and routes, the player is easily put off by the mental investment required to navigate it. if you're not interested in reading through each and every technology (most of which unlock units and features totally foreign, meaningless and inaccessible to civ players and normal people) then the tech web becomes more of a tech dartboard.

that might be okay if each route actually offered a unique path to victory, but it seems that all roads lead back to the same place: a well-balanced if not numbingly dull civilization. the sprawling tech web, an attempt at ~flavor~ and ~customization~ and a ~unique experience~, though perhaps necessary to depict a technological realm yet unreached by human civilization, ultimately defeats itself because the game must be balanced. the tech web, thus, lies at the heart of a web of shortcomings that ails beyond earth.

what made civilization 5 a nuanced and enormously replayable gem was its gimmicky (yet flexible) playstyles -- hoard wonders as egypt, sack ancient-era cities as the huns, city-sprawl as rome, settle one city and amass trade routes as venice -- and it is perhaps most succinctly through beyond earth's abandonment of historical ties that it fails to stay fresh. the game offers just eight factions, each with an uninventive unique bonus and nothing else -- no unique units, buildings, or improvements. gone are the days of keshiks and kasbahs, and in their place is... generic fluff. leaders and their civilizations are devoid of the personality that made them so loveable, hateable, and human in the civilization series. gone is the fun of the game.

even that offense might be forgivable if the game offered unique victory conditions, but each one (save for the obvious domination victory) is merely an adventure in bland passivity only negligibly different from the last. firaxis attempts to distinguish these conditions (as well as the three affinities and most choices throughout the game) by creating a moral quandary, but when it all boils down to a yield-per-turn or some other predictable bonus, even the manufactured moral stress goes by the wayside. inevitably you're left fiddling around at the end of the game, waiting for some arbitrary turn condition or building phase to pass, picking buildings at random in still-developing cities, clicking through asinine messages from the AI as each turn grows longer and longer to process. it's what occasionally plagued civ 5's endgame, except somehow infinitely worse, because the entire game up to that point feels like a meaningless slog through a dark, dull, dreary hellscape with nothing to keep you company but a litany of useless, stupidly-named resources and a handful of practically identical (but still somehow gratingly chatty) competitors.

...but, honestly, I'm not bitter, because it was worth a try.

of course, it isn't totally fair to compare the futuristic beyond earth to the clubs and muskets of its predecessors as if they were on equal footing. but the former clearly intends to accomplish the same things: there are still leaderheads and national identities and culture and conflict and conquest. it tries to drag a game about the development of human civilization -- a game that thrives by creating a petri dish of existing history, culture, and warfare -- into a context that inherently destroys the foundations of the game.

it's from there that I can draw my most definitive conclusion: beyond earth should not have been a civ game. the alien setting neuters the series' bread-and-butter. beyond earth needed to be its own game, unshackled by the conventions of its predecessors, with its own mechanics and its own identity. as-is, it plays and feels like a low-end mod of civ 5's genuinely dreadful vanilla release, except even more repetitive and unengaging.

the idea should absolutely be pursued further -- just not as a civilization game.

MISCELLANEOUS PRAISE:
+decent soundtrack
+customization options in setup (colonists, spacecraft, cargo) make the opening turns a little more varied
+player freedom, even if it's all kind of an illusion and leads to the same result
+multi-step victory conditions

MISCELLANEOUS GRIPES:
-game environment is prohibitively dark. terrain types are largely indistinguishable even after significant playtime, and in that respect alone the game is difficult to enjoy
-the user interface is plainly awful. it will slow you down tremendously. that aside, it also looks like trash. it's dull (thank god we have since put away helvetica) and faction colors (in the most avoidable issue of all time) create an illegible mess
-the minimap is basically useless
-it's buggy as all hell (I have yet to get animated/voiced leader screens to work)
-specialists must be manually assigned, even if you use production/science/etc. focus (and you won't notice until it's too late)
-health totally prohibits growth and expansion early on and spills over after ~200 turns or so
-lacks the personality of a civ game

Feels much like a civ 5 expansion than a stand alone release. I'm glad they tried this, but for long play sessions I'd rather stick to Civ5. There is a lot to love and hate in this game. As a peer of mine said, "I cannot think of a more okay game". Even at the end, if you enjoy Civ you should enjoy this game.

Compared to what some of the other reviewers had to say, I don't believe that this game is absolute trash; it actually has a lot of different interesting mechanincs as well as a new UI, which feels good considering that the mechanics are similar to its predecent Civ 5. None the less, this game has failed in two different categories, categories that are deemed essential for every Civ game: diplomacy and warfare.

First of all, the diplomacy in this game is absolutely horrendous, and frankly insulting to the casual strategy gamer. The system of interaction with other leaders is based off a 'respect' value system, which depends based on your civ's development in various different categories {culture, military and science as well as others}, but does not matter in any way to help the direction of the game. The AI will tend to nitpick the very littlest of your problems/accomplishments, so as a player, you pretty much end up ignoring all of the AIs' issues with your Civ. {Example: If an alien were to pillage one of your farms, and you had to wait on repairing the farm because the alien were still there, the different AIs would condemn you for being not caring for your territory, which reduces the relationship between the two different powers} Even with the relationship status going up and down, it won't matter, as there seems to be no point to interact with other leaders, who are by the way hopelessly bland.

This would lead towards the military side of things. As you tend to ignore the stupid comments of the other leaders, some of the relations might lead to a sudden declarration of war {there is no denouncing in this game, so you pretty much have no clue when the AI will decide to screw you over}. While the player might then start immediately preparing his defenses as well as armies/navies, the opponent will immediately begin the training of two {or if you're lucky three} little pathetic units to invade your heavely fortified cities. Of course, when they invade, their movements strategies are so terrible that they fall easy prey to your units and citites. But due to there being no care for military, once you destroy one of their units, they panic and then retreat to the outskirts of your territory; this would only end once the AI offers a peace treaty with no strings attached, or she/he believes that the destruction of his/her one unit means that they owe you an incredible amount of resources. As previously stated, due to the crappy diplomacy in the game, these sudden wars as well as there outcomes will happen often.

Like I said, this game has a lot of interesting material, such as the development of your civilization towards a certain ideology related to the alien planet, or even the upgrading system of your units. However, these are overshadowed by the terrible diplomacy and pathetic combat AI, which should have been improved upon with the latest expansion. Unfortunately, the expansion was more for show and only added material instead of improving material.

The game overall is what I expected and that is, a fun, next generation successor to Sid Meier's Civilization V. I greatly enjoyed playing it. My only complaint is that as the difficulty level increases, the AI gains advantages with increased starting resources, prferential landing areas, more units and more energy (currency), rather than a better AI for waging war. I do understand however the memory limitations that come with that suggestion, so for what you pay for this game, you will not regret it. It's fun, and that's what justifies it.

Despite the reviews, I actually prefer Beyond Earth to original civ. Maybe it's because it was a fresh take on civilization (I've been playing since Civ II)? I prefer the concept of wild aliens over barbarians. I also enjoy the system of upgrading your units through affinities, allowing each civ to potentially have different units. The addition of aquatic cities in the expansion was a dream come true for me.