Conqueror of a Planet Nobody Wanted
As a child I lay awake imagining aliens landing—not the hostile kind, not the Independence Day kind, but visitors who’d arrived to fix things. Better technology, maybe some light magic, and suddenly Earth stops being such a disappointment. We’d have been friends, me and these misunderstood beings from wherever. Civilization: Beyond Earth cured me of that fantasy completely.
I say that having sunk something like twelve years of mental real estate into Civilization V. Napoleon. Gandhi. Washington. All those dead men staring at me across centuries of simulated history. I was ready to move on. I wanted more than the world—I wanted to rule the universe, which sounds insane in a job application and completely reasonable at two in the morning with a strategy game open.
The premise is clean enough: Earth is overpopulated and poisoned beyond saving, so international coalitions load up rockets with chosen survivors and fire them at a distant planet. Build a new civilization. Hence the name. The Japanese are gone now—folded into some collective of Koreans, Chinese, and whoever showed up to gamescom dressed as Son Goku but is actually named Günther. Good enough. Let’s go.
You land in deep jungle. Slimy beetles and massive worms patrol the perimeter. Something that used to be a jellyfish waves at you from the beach. Green smoke rises from a crater fifty meters away. There is no going back. Humanity needs to survive and you’re the one in charge of making that happen, so you spit on your hands and start clicking.
For people whose imaginations have been scorched flat by Call of Duty, the next hundred hours look like this: one more turn, one more turn, one more turn—for approximately a hundred iterations, then credits. That’s also a life choice.
For the slightly embarrassing subset of us who were born into an era where planetary emperor is not yet a recognized profession, Beyond Earth offers something no other game quite delivers: a canvas for power fantasies so petty and grandiose simultaneously that they’d be pathetic anywhere else. My name is Marcel. You are my subjects.
I’d planned to make friends with the aliens. I really had. But they got on my nerves within about three sessions, so I committed to the Purity faction—the one that thinks humanity should remain human and everything else should be removed—and started vaporizing anything with more than two legs. Africa and this one American grandmother faction were already testing my patience. More cities. More territory. The empire spread and spread and I was nearly beside myself with quiet satisfaction.
The problems, and there are three of them, start with flavor. In earlier Civ games the historical quotes worked because they grounded you in real human time—you felt the eras moving beneath you. Here your advisors interrupt constantly with invented lore, paragraphs of florid sci-fi jargon to explain that you’ve just unlocked a technology to improve solar collector efficiency. The writing is trying so hard to feel epic that it lands as parody. Hours you could have spent on anything else.
Secondly: there’s almost nothing to do. Coming from a Civilization V weighted down with expansion packs, the new planet feels weirdly sparse. Eight civilizations. Wonders that feel like afterthoughts. Trading posts instead of an economy. The bones are all there but the flesh hasn’t arrived yet—and you know exactly what that means when a Firaxis game ships light.
Third, and most maddening: the AI. It oscillates between helpless and inexplicably overpowered, often within the same session. The worst version is when your own cities decide for themselves which tiles to expand into. You want the gold deposit. You want the Firaxite field. The city annexes a square of alien scrubland instead, handing your opponent the good resources on a plate. There is no diplomatic solution to this. There is only cold, bloody war.
Serious fans who call this a stripped-down, green-painted Civ 5 are not wrong. It’ll probably become the game it wants to be after two or three expansions—meaning after we’ve paid for it two or three more times. The full arc is visible from here and it ends with our wallets lighter and the cycle beginning again.
But I keep starting new games anyway. The fantasy is intact even when the mechanics aren’t: sitting in front of a digital universe you control, clicking through a hundred quiet decisions that don’t matter to anyone, building something that cannot disappoint you the way the real world can. And if humanity does ever get loaded into rockets and fired at a stranger planet, I’ll be ready. I might even make friends with the aliens that time. Probably not, though.