Democracy 2

4
This is a polished but standard political simulation game. As is typical in political sims, what happens is that there are a variety of voter groups, and your policies and funding for different issues and programs affects how favorably all those different voter groups view you. The voter groups also overlap, so in sum you have to balance all the different desires so they don’t vote you out of office. Which is a lot like the average dude imagines politics is like (without the corruption and all).

The game is distinct in that it uses a neural network AI. I don’t actually know how much that improves the AI (if any) but it’s neat that it uses one. It at least makes it feel more organic and less mechanical, so that consequences of actions can’t easily be predicted.

My main problem with the game though is that it doesn’t reward experimentation: I feel it should let the player do what they think would be a good way to run a country, regardless of how popular such things can be. For instance, what if I wanted to go all Ron Paul and cut off funding entirely for the department of education? It doesn’t allow me to do that, just to tweak it. I feel it should be more fantastic and less realistic: let me do things that no politician could get away with in a developed nation: after all, it’s a game, not a simulation. The game lets you know what it’s like to balance interest groups, but not so much what it’s like to actually run the country in the way you think would work best.