Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization (PC Games, 2008)

You've just spent the last half hour dragging and dropping colonists and goods. And you haven't yet hit enter. I enjoy a good bit of micromanagement more than most people, but this remake of Colonization seems a bit off kilter. I've got three big gripes with it:

1) No difficulty scaling. I'm not sure what exactly the different difficulties are supposed to do in this game. The endgame is just as difficult on all levels, the natives and other colonials are just as pathetic, and the micromanagement is just as overwhelming.

Furthermore, in any game that wants to claim it can scale difficulty, the first step is to have the low end beatable by anyone - even a newbie to the genre who has never read the manual and is basically just clicking random things on the interface. This couldn't be any further from the case here. Newbies will lose. Veteran Civvers will lose. Veteran Colonists (Colonizers?) will lose. This leads me to...

2) This game is balanced in all the wrong places. There was so much care taken to make a realistic economy, which is pretty nice, that the result is completely unplayable. You will be punished at every turn and every move has a (very steep) opportunity cost. Want to manufacture goods from raw materials? The cheapest specialized harvesters produce more raw goods than the more expensive specialized manufacturers can consume. Good luck striking a balance. Every specialist or colonist you buy from Europe will cost you more. Every recruit you gain naturally will cost you more. Every time you train somebody it will take longer than before. Everything builds hideously slowly and you need lots and lots of colonists to build up a thriving colony very quickly so you can have a revolution before time runs out (which it does very, very quickly).

Oh and I should also mention that you have the choice of half a dozen raw materials to try to make some money off of and they're scattered all over the new world, but if you don't specialize your cities they won't be producing enough to be worthwhile and you'll run out of time.

3) I've hit on this already, but the lack of time in the game is a huge annoyance. Or is it the lack of resources? Or the lack of money? Or the lack of colonists? Something ought to give. Each game I've played feels so rushed that I can't even enjoy myself because I'm trying to think 50 moves ahead so I don't fall behind in the race toward revolution. If it had taken the first colonists 100 years to build a lumber mill nobody would have bothered coming to the new world in the first place. Heck, nobody would have ever left their cave in the first place.

Bottom line: It's an addicting game, but not because it's fun. It's addicting because it seems like it should be enjoyable and very winnable and because the graphics are nifty and because dragging and dropping colonists into little colonist shaped slots is always good fun. But just like a cute little gremlin, I think I'll be putting this one back in its box and hiding it far, far away so I'm not tempted to play with it again lest it suck the life out of me some more.