Democracy 3

I enjoyed playing Democracy 3, and it made me realise that government is a lot more complicated than I realised. However, it also keeps crashing, which is not really acceptable. Presumably this is due to extremists within the game.

I was very frustrated playing this. OK, so I'm elected at the very beginning of the game. Then why are there 11 million members of the other party, but 0 members of mine? I thought I just, you know, got elected. I would think there would be at least one member of my party, namely me. And who are these people in my cabinet if no one is even in my party? The tutorial was massively annoying, and the "quit tutorial" button was non-functional. So, I'd have to click on whatever the tutorial told me to do -- which, when I got to a page where the tutorial's instruction wasn't there, resulted in essentially a hard freeze of the game requiring a kill from the task manager. OK, start it back up, I don't expect perfection. After 2 1/2 years I was assassinated. Well, maybe something weird happened. Start up another game -- an identical hard freeze on the same page caused by the tutorial, and now my cabinet ministers are just a series of stacked horizontal lines. Yeah, I feel like I wasted my money here. That's not even getting into the game play.

Here is the story of one of my reigns as Prime Minister of Canada: I am in power for 20 years. I give the people everything they want to the max in terms of govt funded education and university; max funding to libraries, subsidies to every sector; legalized drugs, prostitution and gambling. I won every election with 96% of the vote. People don't care that we are $1.4 trillion in debt, have a deficit of $100 billion/qtr and are heading for the brink of destruction. This all with an income tax rate of 55%, corporate tax at 25%, sales tax at 20%, Next I tried a more libertarian approach, Still had all of the personal freedoms but no government funding to all that I could. I reduced the income tax from 55% to 20%; reduced the corporate tax from 25% to 10% and abolished other taxes. We had $100 billion in reserves and had a surplus of $10 billion/qtr after five years. I lost the election only getting 2% of the vote. Now my first thought was that this game just loves left wing socialist policies but maybe it was trying to make a statement about how dumb people are. I then thought that maybe the moral of the game was that it isn’t your job as leader to do a “good job” but to get elected. I could easily win the game and continue to get elected if I pushed aside my personal views on politics and policy and went with what would garner votes. In the end maybe it doesn’t matter. If you enjoy simulation games and have an interest in politics you will surely find some value in Democracy 3. I played Democracy 3 on Linux. It never crashed. There is a manual save option. Alt-Tab didn’t work while playing. While playing the game my system used 525MB of VRAM, 2% of my CPU and 2.3GB of system RAM. I was playing version 1.30.2 that I got from GOG. My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.1.3 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.0.4 | Mate 1.22.1 | Kernel 5.2.4-1-MANJARO

There's not much to this game, really. I was hoping for something along the lines of the ancient web browser game, NationStates. Long ago, I had a pretty fun nation where my oppressive regime brutalized my cowering, pathetic subjects, but in the process had one of the top 10 cleanest environments on the leaderboard. You can absolutely forget about playing out such silly fantasies here! Somehow, it takes the same concept as an online novelty laid out in 2003, and does an worse job. I tried out a variety of different (much more reasonable) political ideologies from all across the political spectrum, but it almost invariably lead to assassination. In the times I didn't get assassinated, there was nothing left to actually do except maintain my approval ratings and repeat my policy. Assassinations in real life are rare. Endless reelection in real life is rare. There's no balance to the game. In Democracy 3, it seems like the only two endstates possible, and once you're headed towards one, things snowball rapidly. I can't say it was all bad. I had a little bit considering my responses to various policy questions, trying to get in the head of world leaders in a video game-y context, but at the full price of $25 dollars USD, you should extremely avoid. I can't really recommend it to anybody looking for a traditional video game or a fantasy politics simulator. I can't even conceive of what the overpriced DLC would possibly add, so you can probably forget about that too. Maybe it's the game for you if you reaaallly like the idea of taking online quizzes to see how they affect a violent, opinionated spreadsheet? Bleh. No.