Beyond Earth is the finest thing that Firaxis has made and a game that we suspect we'll be playing for a long time to come. [Dec 2014, p.52]

Beyond Earth is Civilization V with a new souls. It delivers a bright, perhaps too optimistic view of the future, but its great design will set the goalpost for 4X in the years to come.

The Civilization pedigree holds a lot of weight after all these years, and Beyond Earth more than lives up to its name.

This is a work of speculative fiction that allows the player to speculate for themselves, starting from a similar place each time but potentially reaching vastly different conclusions. It’s also a tightly-designed, well-balanced 4X game that is sure to consume many gamers’ free time in the coming months and years.

While the visual and stylistic choices may not prove to be to everyone’s tastes, there is plenty of both new and familiar to satisfy anyone willing to hop on aboard and see where Beyond Earth is able to take you.

This is the bag of potato chips for turn based strategists: Once you start, you cannot stop. With aliens, satellites, xeno mass and all the other futuristic flair it not only plays distinctively differently, but culture, ideology, affinities and research are exceptionally connected. You can look forward to a sleepless fall and winter.

Cancel all your plans and fill up the fridge, because once you launch Beyond Earth you will not want to leave your home. [13/2014, p.46]

It brings a solid experience, with lots of possibilities and a new environment that makes it feel classic but fresh at the same time.

Aims for the stars and reaches them.

Another success in the line of Civ games. It does a good job of setting the scene and taking the player along on a story of hope, struggle and triumph.

This is a must play for strategy fans, and if you’ve always been curious about the genre but never jumped in, your opportunity is here.

It doesn't live up to the admittedly high expectations, lacks in presentation and feels more like an expansion than a standalone game. Yet what it does do, is deliver fun by the bucketload.

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth is Civilization V with planetary colonization theme and minor differences. It's a great game, but a great game well known.

Quotation forthcoming.

It’s easy to look at Beyond Earth and see it as nothing more than an elaborate reskin of Civilization V. In many ways, it shares a similar interface and borrows many components. Yet as soon as you get to the end of your first game, you’re acutely aware of how different it feels. At this point, it’s cliche to say how time consuming Civilization can be, but Beyond Earth only lends further credence to the phrase “one more turn.”

Although its foundation in Civ 5 makes it familiar, Beyond Earth is full of interesting surprises that are pleasantly difficult to master.

Beyond Earth translates the praised Civ-formula to a sci-fi setting very well. The freedom you get with shaping the future of human kind, makes every playthrough unpredictable and exciting.

It takes a little time to get used to (especially the controls), but thanks to Tech Web and the Affinities this is an awesome Civilization game. It is unpredictable, it looks great and there is a lot of freedom to do your own thing.

Passive AI and lackluster online support from the community isn't enough to make Civilization: Beyond Earth a total wash. If you've enjoyed the series over the years, you'll likely spend many hours with this entry as well.

Civilization: Beyond Earth refreshes the saga, even if it had to move light-years away from its original setting. It offers a wide variety of choices making each game different from the last... Although it needs an important improvement on its AI. Civilization: Beyond Earth will give us many hours of fun, playing alone or with friends.

Civilization: Beyond Earth is a game that grew on me. I started skeptical, fearing it would simply be a gussied-up Civ 5 mod. But I’m now convinced it’s a damn fine game in its own right.

If you've spent dozens and dozens of hours with Civilization V, Beyond Earth will probably be your favorite game of the year. The new work by Firaxis built a fortress on the foundations laid by his predecessor, and comes to offer a more complex, customized, comprehensive and demanding experience.

Hopefully the game grows as well as Civilization 5 with future patches and add-ons for the game that satisfy my inner Jean-Luc Picard.

If you like strategic turn-based games and futuristic settings, it's hard not to recommend Civilization: Beyond Earth, even if it doesn't revolutionize the series and still suffers some flaws.

For me however, I’ve found Beyond Earth to be the Civ-equivalent of reading a John Grisham novel: you know it’s not really the best of its kind, but at the same time it is quite more-ish.

Firaxis' latest 4X is not without annoyances or bugs - one mistake can still lead to a lengthy bleeding out, units still get stuck on long journeys, hotseat multiplayer is currently a mess of missing buttons and there are still some moments where you're almost hypnotised by the endless procession of incidental choices you're presented with - but it is a surprisingly profound experience at times.

Firaxis Games already know exactly what we want from Civilization so they gave it to us. They could try a little harder though not just play it safe. [Issue#247]

Despite a few pre-existing flaws carried over from Civilization V, Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth evolves the franchise and has the potential to become an outstanding spin-off of its own.

With Beyond Earth, Firaxis looks back at Alpha Centauri with dignity. Interaction between different gameplay features and the gamer's free will shape this strategic game into a fine gem. Structurally speaking, however, the new Civilization game does not appear polished, which is the reason preventing the game to be among the best ones.

Overall, I would say that Civilization: Beyond Earth was fun, at least as fun as Civ 5. It just wasn’t mind-blowing, which is a shame because all the Alpha Centauri fans out there were kind of hoping for that.

The Civilization series is one of the biggest names in strategy for a very good reason, and Beyond Earth adds some wonderful ideas on top of all that, but the underlying systems have remained largely untouched.

Innovative, addictive and well structured.

Prepare for tech tree troubles, but the amount to discover and overall quality wins out. [Christmas 2014, p.64]

Boasting some clever innovations and generally smooth execution, Civilization: Beyond Earth is a sure bet for fans of the long-running series.

It doesn’t live up to what it could, what it SHOULD, be. It has some cool ideas, it has some that need work and it needs more content. It survives because it has a solid parent of a game to draw upon but it hasn’t done enough to distance itself far enough away.

Beyond Earth is more Civilization V than Alpha Centauri, and its gameplay is smooth and far less linear than the past. But it can't have the magic of Civilization that, with its artists, monuments and links with our story, has more appeal.

Its series of interconnected systems are well balanced and while some of them will feel disappointingly familiar to series veterans, there’s sufficient diversity and flexibility here to feed the series ongoing evolution.

An excellent spin-off that uses the science fiction setting to focus and expand the gameplay in interesting new ways, and yet remains as accessible and thoughtful as ever.

Civilization: Beyond Earth may seem a bit too familiar for a game supposedly set on a distant planet, but the roving packs of aliens and the new quest system make it an expedition worth embarking on.

Beyond Earth is a solid turn based strategy game, but playing it feels a bit too much like playing Civilization V. Compared to the classic Alpha Centauri game, Beyond Earth kinda fails to properly sell the feeling of colonizing a strange new world. [Nov 2014]

It still does what it does incredibly well, and every new campaign in a Civilization game brings originality and variety on its own. I thought the extra-terrestrial setting was badly wasted, but even without any real innovation it’s still a very solid game, just not one that’s much different from Civilization: V.

Beyond Earth is nowhere near the strongest game in the more than 20-year-old Civilization series, but this big collection of interesting experimental ideas definitely still kept me playing long after I should’ve gone to bed.

It’s perfectly enjoyable, but for every smart innovation it seems to have lost a portion of both complexity and character. There’s potential here, but we’ll have to wait for a couple of meaty expansions to see Beyond Earth’s promise fully realised.

In the end, Civilization: Beyond Earth is just a really average game. Firaxis has some nice new idea's - like the tech-web and the way aliens behave -, but they don't cover the fact that the title has some flaws.

Should you read lengthy Internet discussions on what is missing now in Beyond Earth, you may think that the game is simply guilty of being not enough like Alpha Centauri, when, in fact, the problem lies elsewhere. Beyond Earth is worse than its 15-year-old predecessor in all regards, and it has nothing to make up for it. Firaxis made a decent, but shallow game that gets old after 2-3 playthroughs, which is not a good sign in a 4X genre.

Beyond Earth's combat suffers from some balance issues though, and that's curious for a game that leans so heavily on proven systems.

Its best parts are aesthetic in nature, changes to a visual palette that evoke a world of futuristic possibility. Yet the game itself feels regressive compared to the many changes made to Civ V's formula throughout its lifespan.

The solid mechanics of the Civilization series are not enough to lift this game up to its potential. It fails to differentiate itself from Civ V and is lacking in inspiration and soul. A missed opportunity to create something great.

Very much a sidewards step for the series rather than a bold leap forwards for its kind. [Christmas 2014, p.118]

Firaxis' ambition may be great, but their inspiration seems to be left behind on our home planet. We've gone maybe out to Mars in this one, and it's a shame that Civilization's foray into the future is one that reminds us only of how inspired things were in the past. I'd love to see something more inventive in a full release, but maybe that will appear in a less fiscally-demanding expansion at some point.