For 25 years, the Civilization franchise has been a keystone in the PC gaming world and helped establish the 4X genre in video games. Each title in the franchise built on the next, solidifying and improving the core gameplay set up in the first game. Except Beyond Earth, but that was an outlier. It’s now time for the next game in the series -- Civilization VI.  It’s been six years since the last title in the main Civilization line, and two years since Civilization: Beyond Earth.

It's not often that I get a break from benchmarking games so that I can actually play them. That's normally Nick Pinkerton's job, our Senior Editor tasked with handling our game content these days. Civilization is an interesting game to benchmark; it's always been regarded as CPU-intensive due to the heavy processing done between turns and has GPU-intensive buffer requirements for map movement. For some unknown reason, GN staff decided to actually play the game.

We've certainly done worse.

Sorta.