Civilization 2 Gold Mac Review (1999)

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From the archive: this review first ran on the Mac Gaming Alliance (MGA), the Mac games site that lived here on DimensionZ in the late 1990s. It was published around 1999 and is reproduced as originally written, with the original screenshots (click to enlarge). More in the Mac Gaming Alliance archive.

Civilization II Gold is an upgraded version of the original Civilization II which now includes support for multiplayer and includes all of the Conflicts in Civilization and Fantastic Worlds scenarios. Other than those two items, nothing else has changed from Civilization II.

The extremely fun and addictive gameplay of Civilization II remains the same. Advance your civilization with an aspiration for worldwide domination. You can micro-manage each of your cities, or let your advisors handle the production. There are many units and buildings to construct for each of your hopefully many cities. There are treaties to be signed, and technologies to discover. Civilization II gives you a rich and complex world to dominate.

The fun of Civilization II Gold comes in the multiplayer additions. Playing your empire against another real person’s empire gives the game a lot more thrill. You can play over your Local-Area-Network, the Internet through TCP/IP, or on one computer through the “hotseat” method. Note, I would not recommend the hotseat method, unless you like getting up and sitting down a couple hundred times during a game (hence the name, hotseat).

The “Conflicts in Civilization” and “Fantastic Worlds” give you the fun of standard Civ II with the excitement of playing with all new units and lands. Defend Earth from Alien Invaders, take a side in the Civil War, these scenarios play out with a cast of characters and a plot to follow. A lot of the scenarios incorporate entirely new unit and structures for your use, greatly altering the usual gameplay.

It appears that when adding multiplayer support, they broke a couple things… There are more than a few bugs floating around in Civ II Gold, most noticeably for me is a bug with opening saved games while file sharing is active. Hopefully a bug-fix patch will be out soon.

Overall, the addition of multiplayer support, and the inclusion of the great scenario sets make Civilization II Gold a recommended buy from me, albeit a marginal one. The multiplayer aspects and the new graphics and units of some of the scenarios breathe just enough life into another otherwise tired old game to make it an enjoyable play. It did make me long for the upcoming Civilization III even more…

Find a copy

Civilization 2 Gold has been out of print for years, but used copies of the original Mac release still turn up, and some classics have been re-released for modern systems. Search for Civilization 2 Gold on Amazon.

Ratings use the MGA’s original 1–5 apple scale. Prices, system requirements and web links in this review are from the time it was written.