Sid Meier's Civilization VII
Skip · Strategy · 2025
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $69.99.
- Length
- 18.4h
- Value
- $3.80/hr
- Reviews
- 47% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Sid Meier's Civilization VII is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA GTX 1050 / AMD RX 460 / Intel Arc A380, 20 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Lead empires that evolve or endure through the Ages. Build something you believe in with Sid Meier's Civilization® VII.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $34.99, set in June 2026. 11 discounts in the 2 years on record. They run about 40 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 99 percent. On the same math Millennia ($39.99, scores 14) and Terra Invicta ($19.99, scores 59) are the better buys, and they are the games it most resembles.
Critics scored it 79, but players land 32 points lower at 47 percent. The reviews were kinder than the room.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 15 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written July 2026 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 533 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 13 percent of the 4,552 reviews written there were positive, against 47 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.
18.4 hours to finish it, 105 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 5.7 times the campaign.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating, which is the one that means it just works.
The drop-off
28% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
5,931 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I can't tell if it was sheer hubris of the game developers thinking they know better or sheer stupidity. The reality is most of the original devs who made civ 1-6 are long gone, and now the studio is most likely filled with people who don't care about the product, don't understand the product, and of course don't care or understand the audience. Who did they make this game for? Certainly not the built in loyal...
A mediocre game as it is. Worthed a couple games, then really boring. Usual absurd AI bonuses, military victory seems the only viable strategy. Looking for more from civilization.
I have been a fan of this franchise since Civ 5, and I'd love to tell you why I love Civ 7. First.. through a lens of its criticisms: COST and AGE REGROUP rework. COST TLDR-- Love that Firaxis hasn't paywalled the playability of this game through its additional content/leader pack DLC's, and committed to free improvements/updates. Buy what you can, or wait for a sale--the gameplay remains the same for all! COST:: I...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Sid Meier's Civilization VII scores 2/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1295660/sid-meier-s-civilization-viiThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 15, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.