Democracy

Democracy, could be described as an amateurish management game from 2005, whose level of complexity drifts a little towards modern micromanagement, packaged in the simple and effective software aesthetic of the late 90s.

The good things:

-It's satisfyingly complex. The intricate complexity works surprisingly well. Every political/economical item in the game affects a good handful of other political/economical stuff, each one with its own different -and logical- consequences chains. This works in degrees of intensity, depending on your decisions. It's a well oiled, engaging management machine. There is quite a decent list of interesting options regarding policies, which makes you feel like you are really in control of the state, being able to take things in different directions. For what I've seen in the developer's website, I think this game was developed by a single person or a very small handful of people, but for what you can see in the game, you can tell there is a knowledge of -or at least a serious interest in- politics and economy in general at work here. You can tell a lot of thought and testing was put in this complex 'option balancing' aspect of the game.

You can also choose between different countries; each of them has it's own economy, problems, level of development, and variables set. There are countries in which you will have to do things slower, and others in which you will be able to solve and change anything you want in 3 or 4 office terms. You will definitely tell the difference between countries if you try them. One minor negative point here, is that the laws and policies of the countries are not really accurate [we had pensions here in Spain for at least 40 years before this game came out! and our drinking age has been 18 ever since I have a memory, by the way. We also already had phone tagging].

You can't do whatever you want, though. I mean, you can, but you probably won't get the results you want just like that, and if you're not careful with the intensity of your policies, things may backfire. Politics are not so simple, right? Economy is an intertwined web, and you can't please everyone either. Even if you manage to build a utopia, free of crime, sky-high GPD, no pollution and no poverty thanks to welfare, then be ready for religious and capitalist-funded terrorist attacks, militar coups, etc. You can't wipe unemployment nor maximize productivity either, going that route. Any single radical idea that may cross your mind will most probably blow up the whole country; you will have to sacrifice something, even if you want to be radical. In that sense, the game won't allow you to have an absolutely 'perfect' outcome; human beings are not robots, and a democratic government always has to make a compromises to work properly, like it or not. I really liked this notion of mindless radical perfection not being accessible; it's a limit that a lot of games don't bother to apply.

-The interface. The lay out is very well thought out. The aesthetic makes the game look more primitive than it actually is, but it's effective, and you really have everything at a glance. The interface in general does a good job in making the complexity of the game easy to digest. There are some bugs in it, though, which I'll discuss in the 'bad' list.

So, I only mention a couple of things in the 'positive' list, but they're basically the core of the game. I'd say that the experience of the game is very entertaining.

The bad things:

-It's too buggy. Every time you load a savegame, weird things will happen in the next turn. Without exception, your income will drop, always the same amount (this amount is different for each country, or maybe it depends on the maximum GDP, not sure), but will replenish itself back by fractioned amounts in the next two or three turns. If you didn't restart the game before loading, and the situation was very different before loading the save, the differences will appear as 'updates', as if before loading it was the previous turn of that very same savegame (expect this to always happen with one of the positive notices about tech, I don't remember which), and ciphers may suffer weird nonsensical adjustments too. Anyway, whatever happens, don't worry because even if you lose (get fired, lose elections, get killed or kidnapped...), the game makes an autosave exactly afterwards that is playable anyway, so if you load it you go back to playing as if the event of losing didn't happen. So, if you do that, you don't even have to bother about the elections anymore. You can lose and keep playing.

Aside from those weird saving/loading behaviors, the interface bar for changing the intensity of a law behaves weirdly in all the cases where it works in stratified grades (just a few laws/policies do so), varying slightly in outcomes and meaning depending in which direction you move it first, or whether you have made the bar touch one of the ends or not. The election graph and its percentages also behave in weird ways. The voters are always angry because 'you failed your pledges' when you actually fulfilled them, but it doesn't seem to be very relevant to wining or losing the election anyway (is this a bug or is it realism? or both?). Once I even won an election when losing it (this could also be considered realistic here in Spain). Yes. That's the kind of things that happen quite often in this game. It's playable, but seems more like a beta or concept than a finished game sometimes.

-The 'event' system is very poor and counter-immersive. There is only a handful of possible events, and almost every single turn, one of them is picked at random to be triggered. A quarter of them trigger only once, but the rest repeat themselves mindlessly, I won't bother with examples, but you can imagine a brainless repetition of a supposedly serious -and more often than not, out of the ordinary- political/social/economical event once and again, sometimes implying the need to take actions, with the exact same choices, once and again. It becomes ridiculous; you stop even reading them soon enough and reading only the political/economical repercussions. So, they have a little impact in the flow of the game, and the ones that doesn't imply choices actually trigger depending on your spending choices, so it's not totally random and it's a feature that does a little more good than bad, all things considered, by adding at least a super minimal variation to the the game experience. It's just too poor, like there was almost no thought put into the final overall result of it.

-The staticity of the challenge that the game presents to the player; once you get the trick, there's no point in playing any further. Once you know how the game works, it will never surprise you in any way. It will never catch you off guard. Once you know the path towards shaping a country the way you want it (any country; the amount of resources and obstacles is different and so is the speed of the gameplay, but the path towards each desired result will always be the same), as long as you're realistic about the economical and political limits, you just have to go and do it.

There is a 'difficulty' bar in the settings that should make this more engaging, but the only change I noticed while moving it, is that the negative events pop way more often when the bar is high, and so do the positive ones instead if the bar is low, ignoring the real state of things in the country the more you take the bar to any of both extremes. So, instead of adapting the difficulty level in any kind of realistic way, it only makes the events more meaningless and absurd.

I find some kind of satisfaction, though, in taking a problem-riddled country and 'fixing it', once in a while. So I'd say that even with such limitations, the game has somehow some replayability value. It is an extremely unpolished game that's addictively satisfying for a while.

So, I'd say this game deserves a play every now and then. I find myself going back to it every few years when I have nothing else to play (and I have forgotten the exact trick to make everything work just how I want it to, so it becomes again an engaging experience). The entertaining complexity of its management possibilities, mixed with it's ridiculous quirks around such a supposedly serious game subject, make quite an experience that I actually recommend.

If you had the option to continue playing even if the rival party wins, and see the changes they do, and the effect on the following election votes, and having a chance to win again and do your own changes... that would be a really good game, right? I mean, without all those weird bugs, obviously.