What's Good	What's Bad	2.5 out of 5.0
New Scenarios. The addition of the space and fantasy elements. Gameplay is as absorbing as every Civilization release has been for those who enjoy this genre.	Small fonts make it hard to play if you have any visual impairment. Graphics are dark and murky. Scenarios designed for earlier version of Civ won’t work with Test ofTime. Sometimes the game ran very slow compared to other releases of Civ.

Setup ran quite smoothly, and the game was quickly installed onto my machine. When I booted it up, my first thought was that it looked strange, as they have redesigned the city display mode. Fortunately, I discovered that you can switch to the old display modes if the new one was uncomfortable. However, I opted to stick with the new layout and very quickly became used to reading the various displays. The manual is a nice one: thick and packed with a great deal of information. Also included is a terrain reference booklet and a poster showing the technology trees used in the game.

As I mentioned, I'm familiar with the Civilization series, so I really needed no tutorial, but nevertheless checked it out and found it would be very useful and informative for people unfamiliar with the game. The tutorial still works very nicely in helping gamers get a quick grasp of the game mechanics, providing the usual hints about city placement and how to advance.

The big selling point for Test of Time was the fact that you can play it in several modes: "Classic" Civ II, Civ II Extended game, Fantasy, Science Fiction and also internet play. I tested all modes pretty extensively and noted that the game would get very slow at times as it was processing moves. This was most noticeable over the Net in multiplayer mode.

There were also problems with the graphics in that they were very dark and murky. Thinking it was my machine, I confirmed this on several systems and with other players. Surprisingly, however, you run into some maps that are blinding in their brightness, especially the "Underworld" levels in the Fantasy version of the game.

New elements that were especially interesting were the Fantasy addition and the Extended game. In the Extended game, you continue past the launching of the spaceships to actually land on Alpha Centauri, giving you two empires to manage: Earth and the new colony. This dual complexity is quite challenging. The Fantasy elements caught me up with multiple levels of the world to conquer: land, sea, and air as well as underground. Learning how advances should be best made took a fair amount of time -- something I have always loved about this series of games, that you can spend hours just playing and enjoying the slow growth of your empire.

A note to parents: This game is fine for the younger set. There is no gore and no ‘adult’ content. Just exploration, development and conquest. However, the complexity level is such that I would recommend the game for teens and older.

In conclusion, Civilization II: Test of Time is one to buy if you’re a bonafide Civilization fanatic and simply cannot live without the new worlds. Likewise if you don’t already own Civilization II, this version will give you more bang for the buck. However, if you already have Civ II, you can pass this one by, because it’s basically the same thing with window dressing.