Heroic Liberator
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2018
- Messages
- 19,467
Wew, lads.
-
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This Is the President - A Story Driven Management Game Where You Play as the President of the USA
- Thread starter cyborgboy95
- Start date
-
- Tags
- politics
Are they making dumb jokes to cover how they make games about America but only about it from Steven Segal movies? Or are they making dumb jokes to cover for how they are actually cucking you in the most important relationship in your life, the relationship between you and your computer, by pimping it out for bitcoins? Really makes you think.
Leonard
Educated
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2018
- Messages
- 39
I tried the game, didn't expect anything great, but wasn't prepared for anything this bad. Looked promising for the first ten minutes, but then it quickly fell apart.
After playing for a few hours, which seem to amount o slightly under half of the game, here are my observations:
- The plot is pretty dumb, you are a crook president who want to get a complete legal immunity for life in the US by passing a constitutional amendment. Your grand plot doesn't really seem realistic, and all the political stuff really feels like a farce. But it also tries to play it somewhat straight, and none of the stuff really gives a parody vibe (and definitely nothing feels like a good parody or social commentary). It feels like a lot of stuff is overplayed because the writers couldn't do an intense story, so they cover up the mediocrity with plausible deniability of "it's just a parody". The narrative layer of the game sucks.
- The core gameplay loop is responding to to random events and sending your agents on missions and choosing how to use them. Your decisions mostly affect political approval and your money, both of which you need for some actions. Each agent has sort of a profession (Journalist, Bodyguard, Lawyer, Hacker, etc), and depending on the task, it may require a different one. Need to draft a bill? Send a lawyer. Got a PR scandal? You can use the hackers, have a journalist organize a press conference, or have your bodyguard intimidate the journalists. This may not sound like the worst of ideas, but the majority of the decisions lead to bad results, and a lot of the good ones don't really make sense. Even if you have the means (haven't used the agent you need too much) and you figure out what the game expects from you, your chances of success aren't particularly great. The game has a mechanic for warping back to the past, if you want to correct your mistakes and I've been wondering how much the game expects you to use it, because of it, however...
- None of the decisions really feel like they make any sort of difference, and you don't really have any sort of agency. Random events usually offer two choices, and it's usually a coinflip whether they are beneficial or not. Do you promote the new brand of cereal? If you do, it may turn out they are made with slave labour, causing your popularity to fall. Or you may refuse to promote them, and they hire the ex president, which makes you look bad. You get these kinds of events all the time, and you can't make an informed decision, because there isn't really any information to based them on. And since the writing isn't anything special, it turns into a chore. Halfway through I skimmed the main points and selected the choices mostly on random. They also don't matter, because the game doesn't seem to model any aspect of your country, aside from your popularity. It doesn't matter if you improve the security, cut the military, support the education, it's just a boost (or reduction) in popularity.
- Given how many different agents you can get, you'd assume that you have more say, and there's more meaning in the events where you control your agents, but no, they're about equally as stupid. Early on, you go to see a musical, and get a call from your gay ex-lover, who was with you when caused an accident when driving under the influence. You have a variety of options, from intimidation, to handling it through PR, to finally killing him. The problem? None of them work, except for killing him. And you can't decide not to do anything, you are forced to keep trying stuff, until you decide to kill him. Which leads to you losing popularity. This is the kind of distant, minor scandal that would have been swept under the rug really quickly, not escalated to a full assassination. I don't know how many chains have this kind of forced bad outcome, but it really feels like you can't do much and most of what you do doesn't matter.
- Oh, you also sometimes get items from doing the missions, but they're mostly just money in disguise. I've been saving them up, because they looked like an important tool that I could use at an important moment, but the whole time I've played I only got one opportunity to use them (and I could just use money instead, I needed about the same cash as the item sold for - go figure). I also got one active item, I could have my agents snort up some coke. Past early game, I almost completely forgot about the whole mechanic.
- The game feels really slow. The game really loves its window animations and even a short dialogue will have ten seconds of that crap. You can hold right mouse button to speed them up, but they're still slow and you can't disable them. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the game time for me has been just watching the menu animations.
TLDR: The game is shit.
After playing for a few hours, which seem to amount o slightly under half of the game, here are my observations:
- The plot is pretty dumb, you are a crook president who want to get a complete legal immunity for life in the US by passing a constitutional amendment. Your grand plot doesn't really seem realistic, and all the political stuff really feels like a farce. But it also tries to play it somewhat straight, and none of the stuff really gives a parody vibe (and definitely nothing feels like a good parody or social commentary). It feels like a lot of stuff is overplayed because the writers couldn't do an intense story, so they cover up the mediocrity with plausible deniability of "it's just a parody". The narrative layer of the game sucks.
- The core gameplay loop is responding to to random events and sending your agents on missions and choosing how to use them. Your decisions mostly affect political approval and your money, both of which you need for some actions. Each agent has sort of a profession (Journalist, Bodyguard, Lawyer, Hacker, etc), and depending on the task, it may require a different one. Need to draft a bill? Send a lawyer. Got a PR scandal? You can use the hackers, have a journalist organize a press conference, or have your bodyguard intimidate the journalists. This may not sound like the worst of ideas, but the majority of the decisions lead to bad results, and a lot of the good ones don't really make sense. Even if you have the means (haven't used the agent you need too much) and you figure out what the game expects from you, your chances of success aren't particularly great. The game has a mechanic for warping back to the past, if you want to correct your mistakes and I've been wondering how much the game expects you to use it, because of it, however...
- None of the decisions really feel like they make any sort of difference, and you don't really have any sort of agency. Random events usually offer two choices, and it's usually a coinflip whether they are beneficial or not. Do you promote the new brand of cereal? If you do, it may turn out they are made with slave labour, causing your popularity to fall. Or you may refuse to promote them, and they hire the ex president, which makes you look bad. You get these kinds of events all the time, and you can't make an informed decision, because there isn't really any information to based them on. And since the writing isn't anything special, it turns into a chore. Halfway through I skimmed the main points and selected the choices mostly on random. They also don't matter, because the game doesn't seem to model any aspect of your country, aside from your popularity. It doesn't matter if you improve the security, cut the military, support the education, it's just a boost (or reduction) in popularity.
- Given how many different agents you can get, you'd assume that you have more say, and there's more meaning in the events where you control your agents, but no, they're about equally as stupid. Early on, you go to see a musical, and get a call from your gay ex-lover, who was with you when caused an accident when driving under the influence. You have a variety of options, from intimidation, to handling it through PR, to finally killing him. The problem? None of them work, except for killing him. And you can't decide not to do anything, you are forced to keep trying stuff, until you decide to kill him. Which leads to you losing popularity. This is the kind of distant, minor scandal that would have been swept under the rug really quickly, not escalated to a full assassination. I don't know how many chains have this kind of forced bad outcome, but it really feels like you can't do much and most of what you do doesn't matter.
- Oh, you also sometimes get items from doing the missions, but they're mostly just money in disguise. I've been saving them up, because they looked like an important tool that I could use at an important moment, but the whole time I've played I only got one opportunity to use them (and I could just use money instead, I needed about the same cash as the item sold for - go figure). I also got one active item, I could have my agents snort up some coke. Past early game, I almost completely forgot about the whole mechanic.
- The game feels really slow. The game really loves its window animations and even a short dialogue will have ten seconds of that crap. You can hold right mouse button to speed them up, but they're still slow and you can't disable them. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the game time for me has been just watching the menu animations.
TLDR: The game is shit.
I am not familiar with the developer nor do I even remember its name. I just followed this game until it came out, no loss for me.
Heroic Liberator
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2018
- Messages
- 19,467
I was expecting something akin to Suzerain rather than this random story that only uses the setting of the presidency as a narrative device for a personal drama. Oh well, no money wasted on my end.
Leonard
Educated
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2018
- Messages
- 39
I've finished the game. The ending embraced how completely farce the situation was and it was a big improvement compared to the most of the game, and had some funny moments and some political commentary that wasn't completely cringe worthy. Perhaps, if the game completely embraced it from the start, it wouldn't have been such a mess. Anyway, even with the game ending on a positive note, it's still not worth playing.
Mediocre writing and awful gameplay systems just kill any enjoyment.
The balance feels out of whack. Your pool of agents constantly asks for raises that are truly ridiculous (rando journalist thinking he should be paid twice the sum of seven other agents) and they only accept refusal a few times before quitting. Not that it matters much, because they are almost completely replaceable within their class. The agents are supposed to accumulate stress to prevent you from using the same agent over and over again, but early on you unlock a means to remove it completely for pittance. It all feels like a busy work.
Just like most of the game.
Mediocre writing and awful gameplay systems just kill any enjoyment.
Going back to this - this was the only time you could actually use an item like that in the whole game. The whole system is just a red herring that wastes your time.
The balance feels out of whack. Your pool of agents constantly asks for raises that are truly ridiculous (rando journalist thinking he should be paid twice the sum of seven other agents) and they only accept refusal a few times before quitting. Not that it matters much, because they are almost completely replaceable within their class. The agents are supposed to accumulate stress to prevent you from using the same agent over and over again, but early on you unlock a means to remove it completely for pittance. It all feels like a busy work.
Just like most of the game.
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