Sid Meier's Civilization VI

Ten years and two major expansions after its 2016 release, Civilization VI remains the entry most current 4X fans point new players toward when the series comes up, and the reasons why are mostly structural rather than cosmetic. It's also a game whose Steam review page tells two very different stories depending on which decade of reviews you're reading, and this review treats them as the separate matters they actually are.

Districts changed the whole equation

Civilization VI's defining design change is unstacking city improvements into physical districts placed on the map around your city centre — a Campus for science, a Theater Square for culture, a Commercial Hub for trade, each competing for the same limited tiles as your farms, mines and neighbouring cities. That single change turns city placement and growth into a genuine spatial puzzle rather than a menu of numbers to maximise, and it's the reason the game is widely regarded as a real structural step forward rather than a reskin of Civilization V's formula. Layered on top, per-turn policy cards, government types and a deep, branching tech and civic tree give every game a real sense of specialising your civilization's identity rather than converging on one optimal path.

Two expansions that actually mattered

Rise and Fall introduced era-based scoring and Golden and Dark Ages that reward sustained momentum rather than flat, steady growth, and Gathering Storm went further with a genuine climate system, natural disasters, and a World Congress that gives diplomacy real teeth for the first time in the series' history. Both are widely credited, including by reviewers who are otherwise critical of the base game, as meaningfully improving the late-game experience that vanilla Civilization VI was often accused of lacking. If there's one piece of advice this review would give a new buyer, it's to budget for at least these two expansions rather than judging the series on the base game alone.

A years-old controversy worth separating from today

A significant slice of Civilization VI's negative reviews, many carrying extraordinary vote counts, date from 2017 through 2019 and target something that has nothing to do with the game's design: a Take-Two data-collection policy update that players discovered had been quietly applied retroactively, describing broad personal-information collection in terms many understandably called spyware. It was a real, well-documented controversy, and the anger behind it was legitimate. It's also, by this review's own check of the timestamps involved, entirely historical — current reviews, checked recently, make no mention of it at all, focusing instead on ordinary design complaints like barbarian aggression and AI balance. Treat the loudest, most-upvoted reviews on this game's page as a snapshot of 2018, not a description of what you're buying today.

The DLC math, done plainly

What is current, and worth knowing before you buy, is the shape of Civilization VI's DLC catalogue: ten separate packages, including the two major expansions and eight smaller civilization and leader packs, adding up to roughly NZ$218 on top of a base game that lists at just under NZ$100 and is very frequently discounted to a fraction of that. This is standard practice for the 4X genre rather than a predatory pattern unique to this game — long-running strategy titles have sold expansion content this way for decades — but "standard for the genre" still means completionists should expect the full roster to cost several times the base game's price, and it's worth deciding upfront whether you want everything or just the two expansions that matter most.

Final verdict

Civilization VI earns its status as the series' most complete modern entry through genuine structural improvements — districts, era scoring, real climate and diplomacy systems — rather than surface-level polish, and its base price is frequently low enough to make trying it an easy decision. It settles at 8 rather than higher because full completion carries a real cost across ten DLC packages, and because a fair review has to acknowledge that a portion of its historic review score reflects a dated corporate-policy dispute rather than the game itself. Buy the base game, add Gathering Storm and Rise and Fall when you can, and treat anything discussing "spyware" in the reviews as history rather than a live concern.

Price and review data checked 5 August 2026.

If turn-based empire management appeals to you but you'd rather your civilization kept building itself while you're away, Wanderer takes a slower, more persistent approach to progression instead.