Democracy 4: Console edition was recently released by Auroch Digital and they were kind enough to toss me a copy to review,and it’s always appreciated.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you were put in charge of America as it’s newly elected president and you got to put all those policies you argued about on the Internet? For example if you got rid of those pesky guns, taxed the rich, pumped money into science and forced every trial to have a jury? If you guessed you would piss everyone off and you would lose the next election you would be right. The economy does pretty well tho.
Also if you decided to simply get rid of most taxes, cut off all welfare and most other spending you would also pretty much piss everyone off. Turns out Americans do not like insane changes like that.
If you take it slow and make changes here and there while making sure you don’t make too many drastic changes and keep your promises you have a chance at re-election. Really what you make of your time in the office is up to you. I found a lot of fun seeing what I could do to really upset people. For example one term in office I managed to get 0% of the votes while making less than 50% of voters vote. In fact I managed about 650 votes in total.
Winning reelection also isn’t super hard depending on what you try to achieve. Want to lower crime as America isn’t hard,good luck trying to balance the budget tho and keeping your job.
Now that you know what the game is though you are probably asking is the game fun? And admittedly there is no simple answer to this. While the game looks nice for what it is, what the game is mostly is just playing with menus,looking through graphs and figuring out what policies to set and how they will mess with the happiness of citizens. For some people like myself this is a lot of fun. I’ve sat there for hours either trying to figure out the best way to bring down crime or how I can possibly get more people to take the bus without destroying my GDP or upsetting my voters.
My girlfriend however watching me play this game was bored out of her mind and asked how I can possibly sit there and play it. I tried to teach her and within 15 minutes she wanted nothing to do with it. The game is very easy to learn with a very well done tutorial and is quite intuitive. But it isn’t for everyone. If you like this sort of game it is a solid 9/10 experience and well worth the price. If not,this won’t get you into this type of game. Best wishes and may the Gaming gods bring you glory.
Savior Gaming 