Well I've played through 3 games since downloading it and it plays well! The overall game has been drastically simplified compared to the core Civ Titles. It's like Civ lite in many ways. If you play Civ games for the LONG strategy/tactics game and want that for the DS, then forget Revolution. The game is so simplified I can finish a domination game in less then an hour. My UN Victory game took a little longer.
So far I'm enjoying the game. But I would be hard pressed to group it with the rest of the Civ games out there!
Thoughts:
Some of the veteran upgrades can get pretty insane when combined, Especially when you can join 3 units together as an army and gain all their perks in one. On my second game I had a legion army that was a "Ninja Thunder Army!" LOL! It never died and I used it right through the end game for a full domination game. LOL!
The game rewards the player that gets out front fast with tech! I got so many civ perks and bonus units, during the three games I played I found at times it almost snowballed me through to the win.
My first game on Chieftain was SO insanely easy it felt almost like a tutorial game, don't play at this level at all if you want to enjoy more then your first game, the enemies do not make any effort at all to build up and it's basically a sweep! Warlord was a bit harder but still felt to easy so for my third game I upgraded to King difficulty level and actually got some fight out of one of my adversaries, even lost a couple cities due to a lack of attention. Emperor lvl next.
The maps are a LOT more compressed then what I'm used to with Civ Games even compared to small map games. because of this some of the late game units like the jets and battleships seem almost useless considering the fact that roads allow super fast movement of units almost completely across the map and roads are cheap, cheap cheap and easy to build! I only seem to be building late game air and sea units to get to other islands for temples or to finish exploring the map, all three games I played had all the civs on a single landmass.
Regarding the graphics. The graphics are rather old school. Felt very Civ II like, but in a slightly more compressed format. I didn't really care about the lack of animations and such, it kept the game clean and uncluttered which I feel a lot of extra animations might have done considering the serious lack of screen real estate to view them all on. Overall I think us older players will find the graphics serviceable, but the younger audience might feel they got ripped off since the game does not show as much bling as so many other games do. That Aside the graphics are clean and I didn't ever have a hard time seeing what I had on the map!
All in all, a much better game experience then I expected.
O.