This is a really good game on the PC front, but I have always wanted to play on a Mac so I decided to review it this time around.
At the app store, the reviews are mostly good. I have put mine up too, which is mostly bad.
The game is inherently good, with excellent gameplay inherited from the Civilization series. The problem lies with it’s implementation on the Mac OS or rather its porting to the Mac OS. It’s laggy, jerky, and excellently unplayable in even medium settings. Surprisingly, the app-store lists this game having a minimum system requirement of a 2.4GHz processor, 2 GB RAM, 256MB VRAM with either Radeon 2600 or GeForce 8600. The recommended requirement is a 2.6GHz, 4GB RAM, 512MB VRAM with GeForce 330M. The test system had exactly this spec and was running Lion 10.7.2.
When I tested the gameplay, I used the Mongol scenario as a test map since it contains all the elements of a normal game – Big map, multiple civilisations, and enough troops for a mock war. The gaming experience at high settings was hellishly frustrating to the point of madness. I tuned everything down to medium settings, and things got slightly better – but still not playable. In the end, to get a playable game, I had to tune everything down to lowest setting available. The only exception was the fog of war which I kept on high since I absolutely hated the black blocks that show up otherwise.
To make sure that I did not do something wrong to get such retarded performance, I went out and camped at the Aspyr forums for a couple of days submitting tickets about the problem and checking out others who have similar problems. The general consensus on the forums is that of you want to play this game decently, you rather get the PC version of the game and play it through bootcamp rather than getting this poorly ported version for the Mac.
It would also do well to note that this game is by Aspyr and not by Steam – so don’t have any hopes of playing multiplayer through Steam with this version. ‘Achievements’ are also not available on this Mac App Store version. This game does provide you the ability to play multiplayer through LAN though. Game updates and such are also not provided by Steam, the Mac Ap Store takes care of those things.
January 29th, 2012 → 4:05 am @ Hollystrafer
0