Sid Meier's Civilization V
I haven't played a turn-based strategy game since Heroes of Might and Magic III (1999), and I haven't played a Civilization game since the Super Nintendo version (1994). But what can I say? An intriguing demo plus a devastating Steam sale has led me into 40+ hours of Civ 5 over the past several evenings, and it's been a pretty fun ride so far.
What keeps a day-long Civ 5 campaign interesting, and what keeps me coming back the next day, is the sheer volume of variables in developing a civilization. The top-level victory conditions - military, diplomacy, technology, culture - are a gross over-simplification of general play options: as I've been learning over the past several campaigns, a robust play style against non-retarded AI needs to incorporate all aspects of war, and trade, and research, and internal investment. And just when you think it can be boiled down to tactics of picking particular buildings and units and strategic timings, you learn how important it can be to micro-manage each city's work, and each rival civilization's trade resources and relationships.
It's an incredibly deep game, and incredibly accessible too, thanks to the easy to use interface and Advisor tutorial messages. It can be slow at the start (even at the "Quick" game speed), but once the technological pace ramps up and rival civs start going wild, the game maintains a stable, engaging pace.
But I have to gripe a bit about balance issues and luck. Taken on their own, the potential differences in starting conditions - perks of your leader and neighboring leaders, resources available near your starting location, and the inscrutable personalities of AI opponents - aren't drastic enough that I would call them unfair; but in concert, they can be really dangerous.
Last game, for instance, I got screwed by ending up with borders near an incredibly hostile Montezuma. He managed to claim Egypt's capital, and even expanded overseas, before setting his sights on me and dumping wave after wave of soldier onto my civilization; so while several other civilizations hated the Incans, I was the only one with the economy to fight back -- for roughly two thousand years. Meanwhile, Korea was safe on the other side of the planet, and managed to research nuclear bombs and space shuttles almost completely unhindered. It was pretty frustrating, and I wish... well, honestly I wish I knew a better way to deal with the situation, because I feel like I might have been able to work around it with some crafty diplomacy or targeted technological development.
The other thing that irritates me about Civ 5 is the bugs, which - despite the game being almost two years old, now - are frequent and blatant. They seem to mostly center around unit animations: aircraft sometimes circle a target for way too long after an attack; the viewport sometimes scrolls itself away from other players' actions during their turns; and sometimes, clicking on a decision button during a unit animation causes the UI to get stuck, such that I'll have to open and close some menus before I can do anything else.
Those problems aside though, I'm having quite a bit of fun with Civ 5. It isn't fast enough to call "exciting," but its depth is pretty staggering, and each campaign has a lot to offer in terms of options and challenges. I've learned a lot about the game's mechanics and tactics in the past few days, and I look forward to learning at least a little more.
Progress: Won a Warlord (Easy) campaign, failed a Prince (Standard)