It’s a tenuous link, but Age of Solitaire: Build Civilization wants you to make it anyway. Imagine that the ‘buildings’ and ‘foundations’ of a traditional game of solitaire are literal buildings and foundations. By constructing them on your tabletop, you are forming them in a game world. Your stacks of hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs are helping to create civilizations elsewhere.
Now there’s a religion we’d get behind. Earth was constructed by a god idly playing Patience. We can almost imagine his frustration: “sod it, I’ve made another one”.
While it’s tenuous, it looks great. You can forget about the wobbly link between cards and houses when you’re looking at some chunkily realised civilizations. After each game, there’s a satisfying moment where your XP gets pumped into a construction and ‘poof!’, you suddenly have a castle, henge or skyscraper. The diorama slowly gets completed, and you finish off each age of the game. You move from the Stone Age all the way to the Space Age, incrementally building more advanced stuff.
This is the bit we like. It’s the bit that drew us in from the screenshots, and it’s the bit that pulled us through game after game of Age of Solitaire. We shouldn’t oversell it: it doesn’t actually do anything other than look pretty and provide a ladder for you to slowly climb up, but it does a sterling job of beckoning you in with fluttering eyelashes.
We’d love to say that it’s a sign of quality to come, but oh boy is it a trap. Age of Solitaire: Build Civilization gets the presentation right, but the rest crumbles into ruins. Considering the rest is a simple game of Solitaire, it’s a wonder that it gets things so wrong.
The first brick in the shoddy wall is the controls. When you’re on the menus, confirming an option is on the A button, and B moves you back. Which is more than acceptable. When you’re in a game, though, making a move is on the B button. Which is less than acceptable. You can’t change these buttons: you’re left to adapt to the mixed messages of B occasionally being exit, and other times being ‘yes please’. Nope, you can’t change the controls.
Solitaire, like poker, is one of those games that can adapt to a multitude of options and modes. There’s Tri-Peaks, Spider and any number of other formats, all for the simple action of stacking cards in number order, alternating suit. The sky’s your oyster. Age of Solitaire: Build Civilization, however, has the imagination of a prawn cracker. You get traditional solitaire, more solitaire and even more solitaire. The one option that you do have is to reveal one card at a time from the deck, or three at a time. The latter is more difficult and nets you increased XP at the end of the game, but is also likely to end your winning streak.
Forget about B to accept: a single game mode is definitely unacceptable. For a game as malleable as Solitaire, we can’t imagine spending the time to build an Xbox game and not chuck in some different layouts. You’d have to be willfully making something bland.
We had a Nan who played more Solitaire than she drank cups of tea, so maybe there is a market for endless rounds of the same game. But Age of Solitaire: Build Civilization doesn’t even soften the repetition. Sure, you’re building all those campfires and forges across many different Ages of Man, but the XP curve starts kicking in after the first Age. You’re not building something new with every completed game: you begin to only construct something every two games, every five games and – eventually – every fifty-or-so games. You are grinding for hours and hours for the prospect of some pixels gathering together to offer you the measliest of prizes. It’s insulting.
Do achievements save the day? Hahahaha. We’re very tempted to fill the whole paragraph with ‘hahaha”s.
The achievements all have placeholder names like ‘ACH_COMPLETE_STONEAGE’ because no one bothered to update the placeholder game code. Better yet, there are gems like ACH_WINNING_STREAK_10000_GAMES which requires you to win ten-thousand times in a row without a single loss, and ACH_PLAYTIME_10000_HOURS which requires, you guessed it, ten-thousand hours of playtime. Which, in case you were wondering, is 416 days of solid play. Rumble Roses may have a new challenger for the most ridiculously overblown and ill thought out achievement ever made.
The only remaining motivation to play each game is some new card art, themed to the Age. That’s the only remaining carrot, rotten and tiny on the end of a stick. We limply followed it for a bit before giving up.
Genuinely, there is no single reason to buy Age of Solitaire: Build Civilization over buying a pack of playing cards. With a pack of playing cards, you can change the formations and build a house of cards afterwards if you fancy. With a pack of playing cards you don’t accidentally press A when you should press B. With a pack of playing cards, you don’t imagine the developers wiggling their bare arses at you while stuffing eight quid into their pockets.
Age of Solitaire: Build Civilization is one of the best-looking solitaire games we’ve played, but it’s a fancy wrapper on some unmitigated tosh.
