Sid Meier's Civilization®: Beyond Earth™
Skip · Strategy · 2014
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $39.99.
- Length
- 17h
- Value
- $2.35/hr
- Reviews
- 61% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 8 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth is a new science-fiction-themed entry into the award winning Civilization series. As part of an expedition sent to find a home beyond Earth, lead your people into a new frontier, explore and colonize an alien planet and create a new civilization in space.
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 $9.99, set in November 2016. It has been discounted 83 times in the 12 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. 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 93 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Galactic Civilizations III ($29.99, scores 46) beats it on value, while it beats Sid Meier's Starships ($3.74, scores 0).
Critics scored it 81, but players land 20 points lower at 61 percent. The reviews were kinder than the room.
3 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written August 2021 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 29 percent of the 731 reviews written there were positive, against 61 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 17 hours; clearing it takes 79, which is 4.6 times the campaign.
The drop-off
79% start to 1% 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
268 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 like it for just being civ 5 but different. But its probably actually a bad game
AI is dumb -> I don't care Combat is dumb -> I don't care Planet surface design, the colossal, emotional cello themes in the music that makes me cry. The feel of this game is amazing, and after all these years, I still find myself on a fungal planet sometimes. The atmosphere of this game is a piece of art. Maybe 80% of technologies and diplomacies are redundant and so on and so on... but what does it matter when I...
Disappointing. Everything feels fragile and feels like a cheap imitation of previous civ games.
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
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Sid Meier's Civilization®: Beyond Earth™ scores 9/100 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/65980/sid-meier-s-civilization-beyond-earthThe 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 13, 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.