The President

Review

It's election time!

Time to choose who's going to run the country. Will they bring prosperity to an ailing economy, will they to go to war, will they reduce military presence, will they bring better health care and schooling, or will they make cut backs? Have you ever thought, I could run the country better? Well here's your chance to prove it in this political strategy game.

You play as Tom Reed, a rising star who reached the top of the Democratic Party, now the youngest President of the Republic of Dora.  As a small country of around 12 million people, how hard can it really be if Donald Trump is President of the US of A?

You start by choosing the ministers for Labour, Environment, Defense, Justice etc. From there you'll be able to choose which policies you would like to put forward for legislation. This takes a month or two and not all policies can be selected due to either time restrictions or lack of funds in the treasury.

Each policy will show you whether you’re able to put it forward for voting, and above each policy page you'll see the different parties and the number of members they have in each. Once you select a policy, you'll be able to see if any of the parties will vote.  Not all members will; if it doesn’t favour their own party, they will not consider it worthwhile.  They may, however, change their stance later.  So, choosing which policy to put through isn't easy, as you can only propose one per month, and the top dogs may not even vote, or may vote against you in legislating a bill.

After about six months you'll get the dreaded vote of confidence by all parties, who'll vote on whether you're fit for office. So, getting bills passed that please each party is a must, otherwise you're on the rock 'n' roll and its game over!

I'm not a very political person, so I found it a little bit hard to know what to do, especially as there is no tutorial. I'd been playing it for a while before I even found the objectives and how the game worked. This still didn't make it any easier in getting further into the game and onto the second vote of confidence at around 18 months. I know there's more to this game after this point, such as election campaigns, campaign contributors and more.

As of now you can only play as a Democrat, but I think the developers have plans to play as different parties in the future. There's not much in the way of options; you can turn the music on and off, you can select the chat to display word by word or all at once, but you can’t play the game on full screen. That's it, plain and simple.

At first, I found the game very frustrating to play. The game crashed after about 3 years; I didn’t manually save the game, so save regularly unless you want to lose any progress. After sticking with it for a while it was still frustrating, but it began to grow on me.  If you’re into politics, you may find this game less frustrating and more compelling.

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com!