The Frontier Pass and Leader Pass are a good value, adding tons of new civilizations and leaders, though they’re not essential.Ĭivilization VI’s only flaw is familiar to 4X strategy fans: The late game can drag. The expansions add must-have systems such as a Dark Age and Golden Age mechanic (which came in the first expansion, Rise and Fall) and the climate mechanic (which came in Gathering Storm). Fall down the rabbit hole, however, and you’ll spend half an hour puzzling out the best location for a new city. Newcomers can leap in, start a game on low difficulty, and have an enjoyable time. The result is a game that’s difficult to master yet forgiving to approach.

This caused some veterans (myself included!) to shun the game as a backward step from Civilization V, but savvy expansions have unlocked the title's full potential. The latest release, Civilization VI, received lukewarm reviews on its release in 2016, due mainly to a lack of features found in prior titles. Sid Meier’s Civilization arguably laid the foundation for the “4X” genre, and that foundation remains strong 32 years later. (Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.) Of course, some games are part of classic franchises, but others are fresh takes on the genres that characterized that lost era.Īrs Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs. In the wake of a series of high-profile bad ports from consoles, a years-long GPU shortage, and other challenges for PC gaming, I took a dive back into my Steam library to identify recommendations for anyone who remembers the golden age of PC gaming fondly and wants to recapture some of that magic.

Fortunately, some titles (and franchises) still take a PC-first approach. I’m all for more choice in how gamers choose to play, but something is lost when a PC game is forced to fit within the design constraints of console hardware and gamepad input. And the most popular new PC gaming device of 2022, the Steam Deck, doesn’t even have a (physical) keyboard. The answer is less clear today, since most console games are ported to PC and many PC games are ported to console. At the turn of the millennium, it was easy to define what a PC game was: a game programmed to run on a machine with x86 hardware, booting (in most cases) a DOS or Windows operating system, and controlled by a keyboard and mouse.

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