100 for Justice

TL:DR it's a 4.5/10, with the majority of issues due to the late game. Read on for more info. Just finished it. Bought it at $5, and for what it is, it's meh. I'm going to comment on the gameplay, not the politics of the game (milquetoast and AI-generated as they are). If you can read the store page, you know what you're in for, and it does what it says on the tin in that regards. Having 100%ed the game, I can say that for the first two hours, the gameplay loop was fun. It does feel like you're balancing a regular life while also trying to fight against laws specifically designed to screw you. Where all tension dissipates and becomes an uneventful slog is in the latter half of the game, where you are basically untouchable for the first three years, and are grinding Social Points to try and get to the next tier of job. Here are some gameplay problems that all compound on each other to make the last two tiers of job utterly unbearable: -Every month has to advance at a glacial pace instead of just loading into the next one, and there is no in-game way to speed the pace up. -Social points are the main way to unlock new tiers of jobs, yet cannot be earned in any way except for once every three months being able to pay into a fund that won't mature for another two lives. -Money becomes unnecessary after having liberated the first 12 months, since you'll have a whole hoard of it with nothing to spend it on, which makes every life end up feeling exactly the same late game. 3 TP into Association, 2 TP into Education, switch at 6 months into 5 TP Education, and then after reaching Professional tier in your job at ~14 months, switching to 5 TP Vacation, making sure to put 1 TP into whatever SP fund pops up every 3 months. This means that to reach the end of the game, you must invest a solid two and a half hours into grinding from Mayor to President with no real gameplay changes. For someone like me, who doesn't value their time, this isn't the worst problem, but for the average person I assume this would be extremely irritating. If I were to submit some remedies for this game to the developer, I would say that to make the game better, there needs to 1. Be a way to speed up month-to-month transitions. 2. Include some gameplay differences between the Mayor and President tier jobs, even if it's just some new interactions in the Assembly. 3. Give us another way to earn SP, especially something that could allow us to interact with the game in a new way, like submitting laws that counteract previous law's effects. 4. Some form of NG+ or permadeath, where the player is further limited from 100 deaths down to another number. Perhaps a mode where you can rise from Taxi Driver to President? 5. Sound effects would go a long way, like someone thanking you for donating to an SP cause, or the clamoring voices of a Parliament in session when you click the Assembly tab. Overall, in this form, I would not recommend the game due to gameplay, but I believe that there's a world where this game is good enough to buy. I'll update this review if the developer addresses these concerns.