Civilization and the iPhone are an obvious match. A mouse-controlled, turn-based strategy is pretty much the ideal game to port to the iPhone. So obvious that it wasn’t a matter of “if” but “when” Civ would hit the iPhone. I’m glad Firaxis took their time with this one, because if it hit before I graduated, it would have led to a premature end to my university career.

Or maybe not? Despite my initial excitement, Civilization Revolution for the iPhone left me a little cold. The game itself is an excellent reimagining of the franchise for a more casual crowd, programmed by Sid Meier himself. The interface, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired.

Don’t drag, tap!

The basic interaction in Civ Rev is moving units across the world. This is done by tap-and-holding a unit, and then dragging to the destination. This doesn’t work as well as you’d expect.

The difference between the mouse and the finger as a pointing device is that the mouse cursor lives in the screen, but your finger is attached to your hand. As you drag your finger across the screen your hand gets in the way.

This is especially annoying in Civ Rev because as you drag, the game draws the path your unit is going to take. Because my hand covers most of the screen while dragging, I find myself constantly struggling to both move to my destination as well as review the path which my unit will take. That the fundamental interaction in the game is this frustrating ruins the game for me.

Solutions? At the very least, instead of commiting the move immediately after the finger is raised off the screen, allow the player to move the destination somewhere else before commiting the command.

A better interface would involve more tapping and less dragging. Upon tapping a unit to select it, the game would show the possible destinations, and allow the player to simply tap to select the destination. The excellent Advance Wars for Nintendo’s GBA and DS do this, and it works very well.

Civ Rev includes an option that kind of allows this, but it involves and extra tap (to initiate the move command) and is quite glitchy. Why this was not polished up and used as the default movement method is anyone’s guess.

No love for lefties

Civ Rev contains context-sensitive commands for the unit/city you have selected. These appear in a vertically laid out menu on the right of the screen.

Are there no lefties at Firaxis?!

This is incredibly frustrating. This means I need to stretch my left thumb all the way over to right side of the screen. Moreover, like moving, it means that my hand is often covering most of the screen.

A “lefty flip” option would be ideal. Move the context-sensitive buttons to the left of the screen, and the non-interactive interface elements to the right, flipping the current interface setup.

I know it seems like a minor point, but it is very frustrating for us lefties.

Yet another pointless use of tilt

The screens to select a leader and advisors are presented using a rather lovely Cover Flow style interface. Similar to Cover Flow, the player swipes to scroll through the cards, and taps to select. Unfortunately, it also uses an awful tilt-to-scroll method, where tilting the device left and right scrolls through the list.

This means that if I want to select something, I need to hold my iPhone incredibly steady and then carefully swipe through the list. Thankfully, there is a clear indication of how far you’ve tilted the device above the cards. This makes the experience slightly less painful.

There’s no need for this. It adds nothing to the game, it’s not intuitive, and worst of all, it cannot be disabled.