Before we begin, this article isn’t meant to convince diehard Civilization players whether or not Civ 7 is a good game. Opinions on the latest entry in the series are at best conflicted, and at worst hostile in their divisiveness. I get it, after six years with Civ 6 growing through expansions and patches, any changes to the formula were always going to divide the player base. You’re not wrong whichever side you fall on, and I’m not here to try and change your mind if you’re solidly for or against this latest entry.
What I will do is tell you about the Switch 2 edition of Civilization 7, and how it stacks up compared to the heavily compromised Switch 1 release alongside the versions on more powerful platforms.
For the uninitiated, Civilization 7 is a top down turn-based civilization building strategy game by Firaxis. Players grow three different civilizations in three different eras, with success and progress providing benefits and direction changes to impact the next segment of play. Gwendoline Christie’s soothing voice accompanies proceedings, as your style of leadership and achieved milestones determine the kind of civilisn become as a campaign progresses.
The OG Switch port of Civ 7 was serviceable, but hard to recommend. There were frequent and noticeable framerate dips, low resolution output made visuals hard to see, sounds often glitched during play, and there were elongated pauses between actions as the game struggled to load. Play often felt slow and stilted, with rounds taking longer than they should due to the game struggling to keep up with assets spread across an increasingly large, revealed map area.
Performance for Civ 7, via the Switch 2 paid upgrade patch, is a night and day improvement. Visuals are clearer and sharper at higher resolutions, there’s no framerate drops to be seen, audio glitches seem to be a thing of the past, and those terrible pauses between actions are now completely eradicated. The reduction of loading pauses in particular makes a huge practical difference, making it easier to treat Civ 7 as a focused activity rather than something best enjoyed as a second screen experience, with something to keep you occupied while the game loads in the background.
However, the biggest reason to get the Switch 2 edition of Civ 7 over other options available is simple: mouse controls.
Obviously not a new addition to the series, players on PC have as default been playing the series using mouse controls for years now, but if you’re a console player who enjoys playing the series on your living room TV, the Switch 2 edition of the game is your only real option for that functionality. The question is, is that mouse support good?Yes, it works like a dream. If you’re looking to play a console version of Civ 7 on your TV, I can’t recommend the Switch 2 port of the game highly enough.
By turning one of your Switch 2 Joy-Con on its side, that controller becomes an optical mouse. Moving the Joy-Con mouse around moves a cursor on screen, with your trigger and bumper buttons becoming left and right click inputs. The analogue stick on your mouse controller controls levels of map zoom, while the analogue stick on the other hand controls scrolling to look around the map.
Either Joy-Con can instantly be used as a mouse by placing it on a table. No settings adjustments are required. For left-handed users the right click is correctly set to be your primary input, with the secondary input on the left, correctly mirroring mouse inputs for left-handed users.
The Joy-Con mice obviously function well if placed on a flat surface like a table or lap tray, but also work well on plain unpatterned fabric. This means that you can casually use a mouse on your legs while sitting on the sofa, controlling your cursor without needing a formal or dedicated mouse surface.
This combination of analogue sticks and mouse inputs is undeniably the best way to play Civ 7 on a console, hands down. There’s simply no competition, it’s so much quicker and smoother to navigate the game’s UI this way it’ll be hard to go back to a controller on other home console platforms.
It is really wonderful to have a version of Civ 7 that feels complete and uncompromised. There are PC players who will only ever play on PC and I totally understand where they are coming from, but for me the flexibility to have a decently performant version of the game available I can play with a mouse sat at a desk, or play on the TV still using a mouse, then continue to play with a mouse commuting by train to work, without needing to juggle save files just to keep a single campaign going. That kind of flexibility is what makes the experience so appealing.
If you’re someone who really doesn’t like the changes Civ 7 fundamentally made to the Civilization formula the Switch 2 port is unlikely to change your mind, but if you’re interested in the game and trying to decide on a platform, there are a lot of compelling reasons that the Switch 2 port might be the easiest version to recommend.
