Recent reviews by The Last Melon

Wanted to like this game so badly, but this is a huge step backward, and right now it feels like an auto-clicker with more steps.

You can basically build every building in every city, meaning interesting strategic choices present in Civ6 are gone. Just keep clicking build and watch number go up.
No more civilization pressure + global happiness means that the settlement cap is a joke, and forward settling is back in, in a very unhealthy way.
The separated ages makes the gameplay feel repetitive and disjointed. So much is reset between ages, eg. trade routes that it feels like playing the same game 3 times. The targets for each age are incredibly arbitrary (20 resources, 5 tiles with 40+ yield, etc). It removes the full-flow strategic decision making that made previous titles a very compelling and customizable competition.
And above all - the UI is absolutely horrible. Going for minimalism is fine, but they are ignoring so many crucial parts of good UI design. The spacing, icons, text sizing, information availability, etc are all missing.
The one good introduction is the new resource slotting system, but all-or-nothing way they implemented the trades to acquire them, without any ability for the owning civ to leverage their assets, makes it feel (again) very auto-clicky and not rewarding.

I was skeptical before playing, and I want to hold onto hope that future expansions will turn it around, but in its current form, I cannot recommend this in any way over Civ 6. Even for players who may be excited for a lot of the changes that are moving back in the direction of Civ5 (build anything, global happiness, no pressure mods etc), I would actually just recommend Civ5 over Civ7 right now.

Absolutely fantastic successor to Portal 2. An incredibly mind bending and rewarding experience.