Excellent strategy game is educational and accessible.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 11+?
Any Positive Content?
Violence & Scariness
some
A wide variety of historical military units -- swordsmen, musketeers, tanks, and bombers -- fight each other from a bird’s-eye view. Faint cries of pain can be heard, and soldiers crumple and disappear when defeated. Nuclear explosions can wipe out entire cities. There is no blood or gore.
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Far and away the most accessible PC-based Civilization game to date, players’ hands are held through every step, with important information automatically popping up on screen and all available actions each turn shown in the bottom right corner. It can still be devilishly difficult on hard settings, but players should experience no trouble learning how to play.
Educational Value
a lot
Kids can learn about historic events that led to the birth of human civilization and the factors that have governed and altered its growth. As Sid Meier's Civilization progresses, players gain understanding of significant developments in human history and how they led to even greater discoveries, inventions, and social and political advances. Players win by rapidly growing their civilizations in one of these disciplines: science, diplomacy, culture, or military. Players absorb lasting knowledge about the history of the world from the role of an empowered ruler.
Positive Messages
some
This game explores how civilizations come into existence, thrive, and war with one another. It encourages players to experiment with various governments, policies, and ideologies to learn about their advantages and disadvantages as they guide societies toward military, cultural, diplomatic, scientific, or economic victory.
Positive Role Models
very little
The game features a mix of 18 famous and infamous historical leaders, including George Washington, Queen Elizabeth, Napoleon, and Augustus Caesar. While each leader comes with his or her own tactical bonuses that may lend themselves to a particular way of playing, ruling style is determined solely by the player.
Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that Sid Meier’s Civilization V uses authentic historical elements -- famous leaders, nations, resources, military units -- to simulate non-historical empires. In other words, players can, say, lead Gandhi’s India through millennia of military rule or have Napolean’s France become an empire of diplomacy and science. Though the simulated history is fictional, players can still learn a great deal, not just about real-world figures, concepts, and units, but also how cultural, ideological, and geographical factors can change a world’s geopolitical landscape. Play necessitates the depiction of some violence, but it is presented from a high perspective and is quite mild. While it is the most accessible PC-based Civilization game to date, it is still a deep, complex, and demanding game that could prove frustrating for younger players. Keep in mind, too, that online play supports open text and voice chat. Common Sense Media does not recommend moderation-free online communication for pre-teens.
Not the best Sid Meier game, but certainly not bad, its new tile system is a great improvement, but it can tend to be very all-or-nothing and get boring, especially in the later game. Strategy can also be very cheesy.
Civilization V is a great game with massive content. Since it is a turn based strategy game there will be some combat, but it is not detailed. The game is more focused on civilization and army management as well as political and trade dealings. There are references to wine and tobacco, but no shown consumption.
What’s It About?
The Civilization franchise is a two-decades-old bastion of strategy gaming bliss in the PC world, and its basics remain firmly intact in Civilization V. Players select an authentic historical leader and begin the game with a single city in a sparsely populated ancient world. As the years flip by, you scout the land, find additional cities, and meet strange new cultures that you can either crush with your armies or befriend as you work toward satisfying diplomatic, cultural, or scientific victory conditions. And it’s all been made more accessible than ever before. A clean, new interface includes bulletins that pop up on the right side of the screen, ensuring you’re always apprised of changes in neighboring countries’ dispositions and aware of vital opportunities. Just below is a dynamic action button that leads you through all available activities, ensuring that you never forget to move a unit or begin production on a new building before ending a turn.
Civilization V’s changes aren’t limited to simply making things more user-friendly. A new social policy system allows players to mix and match ideologies such as fascism and rationalism for strategic growth in areas like technology and population happiness. And the introduction of city-states that can be used as allies or pawns adds an entirely new element of strategy worthy of significant consideration.
What’s more, Civilization’s battles have never been better. Cities can now defend themselves, which means no more piling them full of soldiers you’d rather have on the front lines. And whereas players once stacked units into massive armies before merrily marching off to war, each unit now occupies its own space on the map, forcing players to strategically line up ranged attackers behind melee units in preparation for sieges. Simply put, it’s tons of fun. This season’s high-profile shooters might steal the spotlight for the moment, but if there’s one game released in 2010 that people will still be playing five years from now, it’s Civilization V.
Online interaction: Multiplayer supports open text and voice chat so players could hear unwanted and inappropriate communication.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about learning from games. Do you think the Civilization games can potentially teach players more about the world in which they live? Do you think this game can make players better understand how modern geopolitical conflicts occur?
Families can also discuss the differences in depicting war from the personal perspective of an individual soldier versus that of a bird’s eye view. Why might the latter be more appropriate and bearable for younger players than the former?
Subjects:
Math
:
addition,
money,
subtraction,
Social Studies
:
cultural understanding,
government,
power structures,
Language & Reading
:
reading,
reading comprehension,
vocabulary
ESRB rating:
E10+ for Drug Reference, Mild Language, Mild Violence
Last updated:
November 17, 2019
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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.
By Chad Sapieha
,
based on child development research. How do we rate?
