It's a management/simulation game where you control a fictional UN-like agency. The game is educational and teaches you about global world problems (environment, poverty, political stability), making it valuable in a sense of how a good documentary film is valuable. But as a game, it's ultimately not much fun to play.
The good:
- educational; also shows how difficult it is for theIt's a management/simulation game where you control a fictional UN-like agency. The game is educational and teaches you about global world problems (environment, poverty, political stability), making it valuable in a sense of how a good documentary film is valuable. But as a game, it's ultimately not much fun to play.
The good:
- educational; also shows how difficult it is for the well-meaning green activists to fight with the short-sighted population and those "in denial" of the looming ecological catastrophy
- it's difficult, you need to balance a lot of things
The so-so:
- graphics - functional, 2D but lack style
- music - it's there, functional, but also lacks style
The bad:
- GUI is poorly designed. Selecting cards each turn is a pain because you need to scroll and scroll and scroll.. You can toggle filters but they don't help much. The clumsy GUI makes this game unnecessarily harder than it already is, and harder not in a fun way. Maybe the whole systems with "cards" was a design mistake. Simply having a vertical scrollable list of actions available for the selected region would work better.
- the game puts just way too much data in front of you, and this data isn't clear or fun to operate with. E.g. you will have GDPs per capita, human development index, emissions and other things which will have values like 53,457 and growth rates like +3.8%. You can track all that across regions, and every turn all of this data changes. This is simply a **** of boring numbers. I know that's what economics looks like but it's simply not fun, at least to a normal person. No one enjoys reading UN's reports or statistics journals about poverty or unemployment in Africa. Good strategy games don't bog players with such unnecessary realism and instead present everything in whole numbers below 100. Just check how abstract and simplified economy is in such great strategy games as Civilization or Master of Orion. I'm pretty sure this game could simplify it's stats&data system a lot, with very little perceived reduction of realism and a large increase of accessibility and fun.
You can try this game once, to get a closer look of what environmental issues feel like. But the boredom of the huge data sheets combined with clumsy GUI will scare you away pretty soon.… Expand