Tapping and holding on an icon brings up a tooltip, tapping the screen with three fingers at once closes a menu you are in. The UI, which I thought would be a cluttered mess is surprisingly clean and easy to use as well. You do have LAN or “Hot Seat” multiplayer modes, but if you wanted to challenge a friend from across the country, you’re pretty much out of luck. The largest – and possibly most depressing omission is the lack of an online Multiplayer mode. All of the features you’d expect to see in a CIV VI game from fully customizable game modes to the “One More Turn” mentality that has defined Civilization over the years are fully present. While there are obvious concessions in the way of making sure the performance is rock solid, the experience you get on iPad largely mirrors the PC/Mac experience.
I’m happy to report that the entire experience has been mostly without issue. In a year that had us see Doom come to the Nintendo Switch in a mostly respectable presentation, seeing Civ VI hit the iPad without having the pare back mechanics or cut items to make it run makes me excited to see what else can be done.
Now, obviously the power of your standard iPad is not going to rival the greatest of PC graphics cards, and no iPad CPU is going to go up against an overclocked Intel i7-7700K in mortal combat, so there was a bit of skepticism on my part as to how the game could handle the immense AI especially late in the game. And it shows – Civ VI on iPad is a phenomenal port, if not somewhat flawed overall. This is our Civilization VI iPad review.Ĭivilization VI on iPad was ported over by Aspyr, a Texas-based company who have worked on porting games such as Call of Duty and Civilization VI to Macs in the past. Was it going to be a toned-down version of Civilization as we’ve seen in other versions such as Civilization Revolution, or was it going to be the full, fat Civilization VI we’ve all come to love? Surprisingly, it’s more the latter, but with some concessions. When Civilization VI was released on iPad, I was a bit skeptical.