Democracy 3

A little too much liberty in how certain ideas and policies work. Not enough actual action to make the game function well. Democracy 3 takes a bit of a side step from reality when it comes to some of its policies. While raising income taxes will make quite a few different demographics unhappy to help balance a budget and funding education will help increase...education, there's other policies that make no sense. Teaching both evolution and creationism leads to a drop in technology, which is not only unrelated to technology, but is backward of the history of religion (particularly Christianity) and scientific advancement. Creating less restrictive gun laws increases violent crime dramatically, even though this is blatantly not realistic. And the hefty emphasis on global warming...err, climate change is a huge concern when there's nothing in real life to back it up. Especially when CO2 is conflated as being pollution and efforts to lower pollution usually bleed into CO2 reduction policies, which would do nothing to help pollution in real life (even if this makes these efforts easier in the game). The game is also staunch on the idea of immigration being a pivotal role in the health of a country, insisting you'll face a skill shortage and education issues if you don't have large immigration, when the exact opposite happens in real life (especially noteworthy that high immigration doesn't hit your school systems either). Long story short, the policies in the game are strongly centered on opposing certain specific political views and concepts by fabricating the end results. This makes it extremely frustrating when you're trying to make sensible and logical changes toward a goal, but get completely unexpected results, or worse, a completely contradictory reaction. Politics designation aside, the game has a few odd design choices. Most painful is in implementing new policies. If you see the list of what's available, you won't see the actual effects of the policies (which are twice as damning with the above issue). Much less how far it goes. If you click one to have a look, it's immediately activated with no way to backtrack on your inspection without spending political points. And if you were happy with the option, you are given a chance to adjust the slider of how hard to push the policy without additional cost of political points. That is unless you decide to click on one of the indicators to see what it is at or does. Or you click away to check something else first. If you come back, the policy is locked in and you'll have to spend points to move it where you otherwise would have wanted. This happens other times too. Attempting to click on an indicator will send you there with no way of going back to where to were immediately. You have to go all the way back through whatever you were viewing and snake through the chain of interactions. Which is nice there's so many overlapping interactions, but the painful lack of consideration for how to view any of it is dismal. Information is vague and lackluster. It's important to completely ignore much of the flavor text with playing with sliders. Changing from modern textbooks to student laptops in government schools won't have a sudden uptick, but it more of a guideline in what it claims is expected. Ultimately it's just for fun and not an actual effect itself. It is a nice touch, but implemented in a relatively bizarre fashion. From there, you really get no indicator of just how effective something will be. You have dollar amounts and some red and green bars that lengthen, but there's no real data to garner from it. And finding out how public libraries effectiveness on what it causes compared to, so, private school vouchers, has no direct method to do so without both in place. This is also particularly concerning when you start seeing a stat plummet for no discernible reason. Suffering from organized crime? Well, the only thing you can do is sit back and let it happen since police intelligence (or a lack thereof) and other more aggressive policing methods are the only way to bring it down. There's absolutely no source for it, at least not that I found, in which to address the issue. Such as, perhaps, all narcotics are illegal or there's a weak border security. Which would make sense for a drug cartel establishment in the black market or human trafficking in real life. That simply isn't a thing here and not a method of addressing that problem. Ultimately the game is pretty broken when it comes to logical decisions and the irritating method of data usage and menuing makes it hard to suggest playing. It's fun in concept, but really drops the ball in making you feel like you're simulating running a country. It's more of a fever dream of what reality is like. I don't recommend it at all, but if you get curious, grab it at a deep sale. Perhaps around the $5 mark.

You can make USA %100 socialist. Enough to buy.

I replayed Democracy 3 recently just because I was bored and wanted to try my hand at being the president. >be me >President of ‘Murica >Decide to expand railways to create jobs and cut down on road congestion >Subsidize railway passes >Put more money into healthcare >Decide to tackle crime >More money into prisoner reform >More emphasis on early education and youth programs >More money into worker’s rights and the market >Subsidize farming >Subsidize city farming >Put emphasis on food safety standards >Make sure our obesity epidemic trickles away >Start prioritizing secondary and tertiary education options >Make university more affordable >Violent gangs go away >Vigilante justice goes away >Antisocial behavior goes away >Obesity epidemic goes away >New situation: Technological advantage >Completely forgot I funded our space program >GDP looks great >Economy is fantastic >Unemployment is low >Thanks to reforms with immigration and naturalization, racial tension starts to fade away >high approval rating >cabinet is happy >about to run for re-election >get killed by a fringe group of liberals What did Positech mean by this

It kind of pains me to put a thumbs down on this game, but when the choice is binary, what can you do. First of all - this is not a bad game. It's an interesting effort to show how everything is related to everything, and gives you a few important lessons along the way, enabling you to experiment with how different countries and cultures react to different things. Of course, being a president or chancellor or whatever the top dog is called is a task not so easily made into a game without reducing complexity, and this balance is one of the most important choices for a game designer to make. In one sense, this has been accomplished well - it's a game that is relatively easy to pick up, and casual playing works fine. However, you quickly realize that things are oversimplified to such an extent it's at times ludicrous. You know, you could just tax the mansions of all the wealthy, implement federal alcohol tax and reduce the military budget by 25% in a few quarters and watch the money pour in. Sure, the mechanisms of the game will make sure this affects public opinion, and not everything is implemented at once, stuff takes time, but still -- you're able to do it. Which leads us to the fact, that.. ..democracy itself is kind of boring. With real democracy, you can't just do what you want, and a proper simulation of that is way more difficult to make (and probably play). So what we have here isn't "Democracy 3", it's "Dictatorship 3". Yeah, you have to win the election, but it's not that hard, and as a dictator you still have to be wary of public dissent and the will of the elite. It was fun to play it through once, but that's it I guess. Maybe there's a few sequels to check out, I guess this game is old now..

I booted up the game upon seeing the recent negative reviews and confirmed my copy is still working perfectly fine. I'm not sure what's causing the bug for these players, but perhaps they have newer systems, maybe the GPU is not compatible with such an old game or the control panel has some new setting that breaks the display. I'm running the game on a 1080 ti. Democracy 3 is exactly what it is on the tin, you sim a government. It's a good game. I had to make sure it was still standing since it's part of TotalBiscuits legacy, but my copy runs the same as it always did.

Game is unbalanced and broken.

It's ok. Not bad, but not enjoyable past the first run or two; and they don't take long because you get assassinated with an alarming frequency.

I enjoy the mental challenge and the ability to test unusual variations of modern government and the honest approach to fickle social dynamics that can have the people doing well and still voting you out because of perception. Its a good heads up given today's political environment.