Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide Critic Reviews

Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth Rising Tide is a well developed, superbly balanced, and refined evolution of the original.

This is an expansion like those we used to get. Tons of content, fresh and creative additions and, above all, more Civilization.

That old Civilization mantra still echoes, just like it used to: One more turn.

Fans of CivBE will want to pick this one up. While nothing groundbreaking has been added, the new features flesh out some gameplay from the original, and add the new frontier of aquatic colonization. Perhaps a little heavy on the micromanagement, the overall pace of the game retains that “one more turn” quality.

Rising Tide is an overhauled look at the core experience, and it would be difficult to go back to Beyond Earth without the myriad enhancements the expansion offers. As with Civilization V before it, Beyond Earth looks like it’s becoming all it can be as it evolves with these upgrades.

So much new content, and quality content too. Some problems are left unanswered, but, overall, Beyond Earth has gained a great boost in personality and uniqueness.

Good to see that Firaxis Games is following its tradition in optimizing core-game-features, that could have been worked out in a better way. So Beyond Earth’s diplomacy is much more entertaining now, the aquatic gameplay and the hybrid-affinities now offers much more strategical depth. The new artifact-system is a lot of fun to experiment with and there are many improvements in feature-details. But still it’s not the same overall fantastic game experience, that Civilization stands for. Even with the add-on improvements, Beyond Earth appears like a little sci-fi-brother to Civ 5.

There’s no single feature that will revolutionise Beyond Earth’s fairly conventional approach to strategy, but as a complete package this expansion does a great job of fleshing out the game’s mechanics and giving it a sense of identity that previously was sorely missing.

Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide isn’t an entirely new game, but it’s not far off. It gives fans of the original game plenty of reason to dive back in for not just one, but hundreds or thousands more turns.

This Beyond Earth expansion offers many more hours of rebalanced gameplay to the saga's fans.

I didn’t know exactly what I was missing until Rising Tide filled in the blanks, but now Beyond Earth is more engaging than ever as a Civilization sci-fi experience.

The first expansion for Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth is a step forward, but not without its problems. While new concepts are many, and some of them also daring, they are far from perfect and still need work and balance. If you loved the basic Beyond Earth, then it's highly probable you'll love Rising Tide too, otherwise it could be better to wait for further expansions.

The huge amount of improvements are fitting well. It's no Alpha Centauri 2 yet - but it's getting closer.

To use a Civilization V metaphor, this is "Beyond Earth: Gods and Kings,": it adds a few new things, adjusts a few others, but overall doesn't really have much impact on the core game. The mechanics are still there, but it's sort of ironic that this expansion adds in aquatic combat, since the thing it seems to lack most is depth. It's a coat of paint, not a deep fix.

Rising Tide enhances Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth to the point that it's difficult to imagine the game without it; in fact, the regular Civilization series should take a few cues from Rising Tide.

Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide is a mixed bag: it is an expansion that fails to meet the standards of its classic counterpart; however, it adds much needed improvements to water combat and diplomacy. Recommended for completionists more than for newcomers, who should stick with Civilization V and its expansions.

Rising Tide makes Civilization:BE better in almost every possible way. Besides an alien sea to colonize, this add-on develops the diplomatic system and Affinities into something new.

Rising Tide is a substantial step forward in Civilization.

All in all, Rising Tide is a decent addition to Beyond Earth, and yes, it finally feels like a game that has achieved escape velocity and left the atmosphere and gravitational pull of planet Civ 5.

Firaxis Games manages to pull out a nearly flawless balance between complexity and simplicity. It adds more levels of gameplay and a greater variety of paths to choose from, but at the same time it becomes more intuitive and easy to understand.