Fresh from a successful summer campaign on home consoles, Civilization now marches into handheld territory with a slimmed-down but essentially identical version of Revolution, joining similar strategy-orientated franchises Age Of Empires and Anno 1701 on DS.

While the 2D graphics are little more than functional, and charming cutscene footage of Carthaginian dancing bears and the like is missing, the game’s essence remains very much intact: grow an empire by achieving the right balance between economic, technological, cultural and militaristic aspects of government.

Options for the main singleplayer game, Random Map, are somewhat lacking, with difficulty level and leader being the only variables. Veterans of the PC version will baulk at both the absence of tweakability and the rapidity with which games can be completed, being a matter of a few hours rather than weeks.

However, the presence of ten different scenarios, each with a bias towards one particular area of government, bestows variety and longevity, and there’s the post-release promise of competitive Game of the Week scenarios too. Four-player online adds further meat to the package.

The control system is as accomplished as you could wish for. Unit movement and menu navigation are controlled via the stylus, which proves a more than adequate substitute for a mouse. Only when scrolling across the world map does it feel clumsy.

In terms of distilling the core Civilization experience from PC to handheld, this is almost as victorious as the PC-to-console iterations.

7/10