Beyond Earth is the finest thing that Firaxis has made and a game that we suspect we'll be playing for a long time to come. [Dec 2014, p.52]

While the visual and stylistic choices may not prove to be to everyone’s tastes, there is plenty of both new and familiar to satisfy anyone willing to hop on aboard and see where Beyond Earth is able to take you.

As first impressions go, Civilization Beyond Earth makes a staggeringly poor one. After a few games -- after you get your head around the affinities and the tech web and the dos and donts of living on an alien planet -- it becomes a gorgeous and engaging, if not revolutionary, 4X game.

Civilization: Beyond Earth may seem a bit too familiar for a game supposedly set on a distant planet, but the roving packs of aliens and the new quest system make it an expedition worth embarking on.

Beyond Earth is a solid turn based strategy game, but playing it feels a bit too much like playing Civilization V. Compared to the classic Alpha Centauri game, Beyond Earth kinda fails to properly sell the feeling of colonizing a strange new world. [Nov 2014]

Beyond Earth takes the solid foundation of Civilization to offer a more immersive experience, perhaps the best since Alpha Centauri, if not better.

All the decisions I’ve made have snowballed into a massive unwieldy clockwork of inconsequence, lumbering towards an inevitable conclusion like a giant Katamari ball consisting of all those little decisions, none of them steering it in any meaningful way, but each of them lending the monstrosity a tiny bit of mass. Then the ball reaches the requisite mass and a screen tells me I’ve won and I’m back at the main menu. No recap, no score breakdown, no map to admire, no ranking. Poof.