Collapse: A Political Simulator

I like Kremlingames, but this game is not ready for release; confusing user interface, no tutorials, no advice on game principles, no proper dashboard, no warnings, too random.

You take control of a Post-Soviet Republic after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's like the previous games, alot of text/lore and button clicking, if you liked the previous games, then this is for you. The game also supports mods. There is a clicking sound, whenever you hover over an option, which is atleast for me annoying. The English is understandable, but weirdly written, the developers have a strong english language support base, I don't understand, why they don't let them volunteer to help improve the texts. But other than that, it's an alright game, if you liked the previous games, and are interested in the concept, then this is nice.

Play Suzerain insteade

Terrible english, opaque yet intriguing game mechanics, a great sense of humour, and post-communist politics- yup, it's a Kremlingames production alright. This one needs a more informative UI before I can recommend it. Love Kremlingames, but those opaque mechanics are definitely too opaque at the moment. This is exacerbated by the really bad english, which renders some tooltips useless.

The game has a lot of potential. There aren't many polsims out there of this type, and the setting is truly interesting. Alas, as it stands, in its English version the game is quite incomprehensible, I couldn't even understand what the ending I got was. I can't currently recommend this game in good conscience to anyone who doesn't speak Russian (I don't). I hope however that this game will be updated one day, and I will finally be able to understand what decisions I am making and maybe be able to recommend it as well. Also, the constant "pop"ping sound is sooo annoying.

The game is brutally hard I have spent over 90 hours trying to understand the game mechanics. even in sandbox mode the game is hard and since the last few updates the game in my opinion isn't worth it at this moment. maybe in the next update i will reconsider. Also the game needs to have better english translation it is very hard to understand what you are doing in the game.

EDIT: I am adding this edit to say that I eventually found a "seam" and managed to get to a win condition. I do like certain things about this game, I would not have pushed through if I didn't. There is a ton of depth, history, and care in this game. But at the end of the day, if you are looking at a Kremlingames game you know what you are getting in to and this one is rough even by their standards. Therefore, I still can't recommend it. I wish they would just spend a bit of money to get a good functional English localisation, or even just fix the acronym nightmare. Until then stick with Ostalgie, Crisis in the Kremlin, or my favourite China: Mao's Legacy END OF EDIT I have tried and tried and tried to learn the perfect combination of decisions that will allow the player to have a chance at surviving, but I just can't figure it out. I have gotten game over screens every single time I play, on the easiest difficulty, and always within the first few years of starting the game. The translation is rough, which I can understand somewhat, but the number of acronyms for things makes everything so obtuse that it is almost impossible to know what effect your decisions are even having. Also there is very little documentation online about how to play, only very basic guides (yes I even searched in Russian using google translate). The ususal game goes like this: Pick a party, wait a month til the first election, win a region or two and get enough power to control one or two ministries, they start with some money, corruption and effectiveness. Then the corruption in your ministries and regions just starts going up extremely quickly (whether you fight it, do nothing, or help it, it makes no difference). Next your party unity will fluctuate for reasons you have no way to know, hope you don't click one of the decisions that tanks it, what decisions will do that you might ask? No way to know, there's no real useful tooltips. You can raise money or unity in your party screen, but sometimes you get a gameover as soon as your money or unity go down before you can get to that screen. Oh and by the way there is Lower, Middle, and Upper class aggressiveness, these you can almost understand what would theoretically affect them (laws and such) but in reality I have never seen these change when laws are changed. Also there is a crime stat, can you see it anywhere? No, you can't. Better keep crime down though, or else you get events that cost money and support and then you lose. How do you affect crime? No way to know. You can look at the regions and ministries/portfolios that the other parties (the AI run parties) are running and see their corruption/budget/effectiveness, and it is always way better than yours. How? Why? Who knows. I can't emphasize enough how little time it takes for these things to get completely out of control. In one game I tried taking the Prime Minister portfolio, it started with a balance of 400/600 (600 being theoretically maximum effectiveness), and a monthly decrease of 150. This meant that within 3 months the Prime Minister portfolio would be at -50 (a situation that has pretty bad consequences oh and also means you can't do anything), all my other ministries had deficits as well so there was no way to reallocate funds. What causes this deficit? How does the AI avoid it? What do you do? No way to know any of this. You might be noticing a pattern here. I want to like this game so badly, I want to understand what the trick is to get it to work, but right now it feels like a game that was designed to be as obtuse as possible so that only the creator could actually understand. If anyone knows what the trick to getting it playable is please tell me, but if you are thinking of picking this one up because it looks interesting and compelling, stay away.

You need to power through a boring and irrelevant intro section, then an incredibly rough UI. After that you get like an hour or two of fun. The game is just too limiting. Almost every department is completely broke and you can't do anything with it, so much is tied to events or departments you don't control.

Можно было бы сделать скидку на то, что игры в этом жанре редкость, а сама задумка неплохая, но камон, ребят. Почему игра выглядит как будто ее делали в Ворде? Шрифты съезжают, диаграммы все кривые, многие вещи сделаны очень топорно. Например, почему нельзя сделать элементарные зеленые и красные столбики, сколько в парламенте проголосовало за и против? Почему бы не сделать диаграмму распределения мест партий в парламенте? Сейчас чтобы понять счет по законопроектам, нужно вручную складывать голоса всех партий по списку, это просто дурдом какой то. Также игра имеет ярко выраженную идеологическую заряженность - сотрудничество с США дает дебафы, сотрудничество с Россией - только плюсы. Либералы плохие, демократия не работает, фашисты и нацисты норм, и тому подобная шизофрения. Такое ощущение, будто авторам по 14 лет, и они пытаются реализовать свой юношеский максимализм. В парламенте есть одновременно и фашисты, и левые (левых аж три вида - хардкорные коммунисты, современные социалисты и социал-демократы), а также нацисты, причем голосуют за них столько же, сколько за умеренные партии, что в реальной жизни происходит чрезвычайно редко. По какому принципу какие партии голосуют За и Против реформ тоже понять невозможно, как и повлиять на это. После любых изменений законов, даже таких, которые поддерживает 90+% населения, в стране начинаются протесты, погашение которых зависит не от ваших действий, а от предзаписанного игрового сценария. В игре нет абсолютно никакого обучения, и нужно обязательно 3-4 раза проиграть, чтобы хотя в базе понять, как игра работает. Есть неплохие механики, типа менеджмента внутри своей партии или борьба за министерские кресла по результатам выборов (Хотя в жизни он работает совершенно не так, не все партии в парламенте разбирают министерские портфели, а только победившая коалиция, которая формирует всё правительство). Опять же, фашист будет сидеть в Минобороны или коммунист, также ни на что не влияет. В общем весь этот бред можно часами описывать, сводя все к одному итогу - очень неплохую идею реализовали настолько ужасно, насколько это вообще возможно. Причем игры такого плана не требуют большого количества ресурсов или графики, это же симулятор Экселя по сути своей. Серия игр Democracy, хотя и не без недостатков, сделана гораздо качественнее и приятнее визуально.