5 Best Firaxis Games That Aren’t Civilization

Firaxis Games was formed in 1996 after Sid Meier, Jeff Briggs, and Brian Reynolds decided to leave MicroProse. Meier and his crew couldn’t originally bring his seminal Civilization series with them, but they eventually got the rights back thanks to Take-Two Interactive, which purchased the rights from Infogrames. With the crown jewel back, Firaxis reached a new stratosphere of popularity and has maintained that since by continually releasing new Civ games. However, that mega-popular series isn’t the only thing Firaxis does. The studio has quite a few great games in its catalog.

Here are the five best Firaxis Games that aren’t Civilization.

5) Sid Meier’s SimGolf

SimGolf seems like a weird game for a studio that’s so well-known for strategy games, but this one isn’t just a golf game. You do create your own pro golfer and take them around the world winning championships, but the standout feature is the ability to build your own golf course.

As you win more tournaments, you’ll earn more money, which you can use to expand your golf course. Eventually, you’ll have a full 18-hole course that’s becoming self-sufficient. Plus, you can jump online and download other players’ courses, giving SimGolf near-infinite replayability. It’s not for everybody, but golf sickos loved the depth on offer.

4) Sid Meier’s Pirates

Sid Meier released his first Pirates game in 1987. He also released a full remake called Pirates Gold in 1993. So this 2004 release is technically the second remake of that original game, but it is the best version of the three, thanks to the depth provided by all of the different minigames.

See, Pirates‘ big gimmick is that players must engage in several different activities while exploring the Caribbean. That includes everything from sailing to turn-based naval strategy to dancing with the governor’s daughter. As a true pirate, you’ll need to excel at everything to earn a top score. It does start to get a bit repetitive after a few playthroughs, but it’s still a solid remake of one of Meier’s classics.

3) Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Marvel’s Midnight Suns deserved so much more love. Firaxis took a great IP and tossed in XCOM-style tactics. They didn’t stop there, though. Midnight Suns incorporates a deck-building system that forces players to carefully roll with the punches. It still keeps the action moving, but it adds a great wrinkle to classic turn-based tactics. In many ways, Midnight Suns should be the next evolution for XCOM.

Toss in a compelling story filled with fun characters and an open-world hub map that’s ripe for exploration, and you have one of the better games of 2022. Unfortunately, it didn’t sell well. That was a surprise given the Marvel IP, but it seems that the tactics combat was too much for the wider audience. It’s a shame we’ll probably never get to see the team make a second game and smooth out some of its rough edges. And it’s even worse that several members of the team were laid off because of the poor sales.

2) Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri

Alpha Centauri was basically Civ in space, but it did not actually have the Civilization name. Firaxis didn’t get the name back until a few years later, so Firaxis’s first stab at capturing that magic again doesn’t technically fit within the Civ timeline. Still, it’s very similar at the base level, which is why many view it as the spiritual successor to Civilization II.

Everything about Alpha Centauri is great. The single-player campaign is a captivating sci-fi tale that serves as a great introduction to Firaxis’ brand of strategy. The gameplay was best-in-class for its time and still holds up. The spacefaring additions were welcome changes, leading to several Game of the Year awards from around the industry. It’s just too bad we’ve never received a proper sequel (unless you count Civilization: Beyond Earth, which I do not)

1) XCOM: Enemy Unknown

The X-COM series from the ’90s was beloved, spawning a series of three sequels. By that fourth game (X-COM: Interceptor), the bloom was fully off the rose. It then went into hibernation for more than a decade. Well, that’s not technically true. Director Jake Solomon started pitching Firaxis about making a new X-COM game since he joined the company in the late ’90s.

Solomon finally was given the go-ahead to work on a prototype in 2003, but it wasn’t until 2012 that XCOM: Enemy Unknown finally launched. Lucky for us that Solomon kept pushing because Enemy Unknown was a revelation for tactics games at the time. It came in like a breath of fresh air and gave Firaxis a second franchise to build around next to Civilization. You could argue XCOM 2 is the better game, but Enemy Unknown is far more important for Firaxis.

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