One of the really fun and addictive games this generation!
The game eases you in with a tutorial game on 'chieftain' difficulty and this is great for working out how to play and how the game works. It gives a detailed explanation of what you should do and is very useful. It might just get a little annoying after a while however, with advisers getting in your way every few minutes.
To those who have played the Civilization series on the PC, this game is just as in-depth as its PC counterparts and is just as addictive. The only thing that is missing it having to build workers, which in many ways is good. You can still micromanage cities if you like, like having workers concentrate on science output instead of production output, for example.
The battle animations and visuals are extremely smooth, colourful, ascetically pleasing and just as detailed as in Civilization IV. The maps are very nice and big but they are mostly water, with not as much land as in the PC games. This is not a bad thing as cities borders don't expand anywhere near as much as before, even though your cities do improve at a similar, if not even faster pace.
A game will take you several hours but is not as drawn out as Civilization IV, with technologies hardly taking any more than 10 turns. Another advantage is that if there is nothing to do, like you have something that will take 9 turns to build, it will do those turns straight away: no waiting around in this game.
The Great People and Wonder are improved in that they more greatly effect your game, and you can clearly see the benefits of them.
The only slightly disappointing thing about this game is that the multiplayer might take forever. Not because it's slow, it's just that your opponents seem to take forever to finish their turn. Sometimes I was waiting a few minutes, which can get somewhat annoying after a while.
All in all this is a brilliant and well thought-out game which works well on the console platform, keeping the depth and addictiveness of it's predecessors. I would recommend this game to everyone, even the most hardcore PC strategy game fan that would refuse to play a strategy game on console because they think it would be terrible.