Game Review: Democracy 3
Every once in a while, I find a nice little indie game that just sucks me in. Upon watching a playthrough of this particular game, Democracy 3 became one of those “must have” sims. And though I’ve had plenty of fun playing through it, I quickly discovered that once you find the proper formula, victory is almost assured. For while the game excels in the realm of complex interactions of cause and effect, it fails to take in enough details to make the process of running a country truly challenging.
The layout of Democracy 3, as you can see from the picture above, is all about a map of little circles. You start with a country of your choosing (there are 6 you can pick from) and then try to make the best of it. Each country will start with its own set of problems (shaded red) as well as its own selection of currently active policies (shaded white). Blue-shaded circles indicate the ongoing issues that will never go away, such as crime, poverty and your country’s GDP, but can be manipulated via altering the other policies.
The trick is to balance your GDP with the happiness of your people. You need money to run the country or things go to hell, so as long as you keep the cash flowing you’ll have the ability to implement policies without too many side-effects. You can raise taxes to make money, but generally people get upset by that, so you have to go back and forth between tax revenue and a high level of GDP. From there, you can manipulate your country however you like.
Though many policies are already in place, you can pick new ones to start up or cancel old ones. Each turn you’re given a certain amount of political influence and you spend that to make changes. Some changes are easy, such as raising the intensity of your anti-discrimination act, while others are hard, such as bringing about enforced nationwide military service. As you make changes, they will chain-reaction through the political structure and either fix problems or cause new ones. They will also affect how each group of voters feels about you, determining whether or not you’ll make it through the next election successfully.
Sound complicated? It is, but that’s what makes it so fun. You can really create a country that mirrors what you think would be the “right” way to do things. Or get creative and turn the
Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that all you really need to do is jack up your technology, education and GDP and you can do almost anything you want to your country and have few repercussions. As long as you don’t try to move things along too fast, you’ll always have complete control. If you go crazy and push unpopular policies early, you’ll be assassinated, but you can target hostile groups and shrink their numbers with a little bit of planning.
The biggest complaint I have about the game is that most of what you do will piss off the rich folks and the capitalists, but they have such low voting power that it rarely matters. If the game implemented a more realistic system whereby the rich could influence the country in other ways, thus making it hard or impossible for you to get things done if they weren’t happy, it would make the game much more difficult.
All-in-all, Democracy 3 is a very fun game to toy with, but the replayability is too limited to justify the $25 that you spend on it. Of course, if you try to turn your country into a smoking pile of ash and keep power while doing it, you may just have an endless amount of playability on your hands, as you’ll likely just end up getting killed over and over. If you’re into political sims and have some extra cash, it might be worth the buy. If you’re broke like me and can only afford a new game every once in a while, then I’d look for something more long-term.
Photo Credits -
Democracy 3 courtesy of usgamer.net
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