Game review: Democracy 3

Democracy 3 is essentially sim-president, allowing you to run one of several countries the way you want with the policies you like.

System: PC

Price: $24.99 on Steam

Age restriction: Unrated

You interact with the game purely by setting and altering policies – spending political capital to do this.

That capital is gained through your ministers, who each sympathise with particular special interest groups. If you annoy those groups too much, your ministers don’t give you much capital, and may even end up resigning.

The layout looks cluttered at first, with policies essentially being laid out as coins on a counter linking to various results and issues, but after five minutes of playing I found it surprisingly intuitive.

The various bubbles give you precisely the right amount of feedback for your decisions, and you can see exactly how your country is doing.

You will want to solve various national crisis – whether they be asthma epidemics or organised crime, and keep yourself reasonably popular with the electorate.

They can, after all, vote you out.

It is interesting to note that sometimes what actually works for dealing with one crisis isn’t what the people want – legalising prostitution for example can cut down organised crime, making your people safer but annoying parents.

I think the developer's politics mirror my own, because I found the policies I implemented landed up producing a virtually pollution free atheist utopia with a technological edge on the rest of the world, zero poverty and virtually no crime.

It would have been worrying the fact that religious leaders kept calling me the devil incarnate, but by the end of that session there weren’t any religious people around for them to lead and I was winning elections with 97% of the vote.

I am not opposed to the fact that policies implemented specifically to annoy the religious segment of society seem to be the ones that work best in game; I just think people of differing ideologies may see it as being a little bit propaganda-ish.

This game is very much a simulation – it isn’t a game which you play to win so much as you play to see what you can get away with.

I found it fun – and with the steam workshop you can get mods for all sorts of things such as different countries you can lead and different policies you can implement.

If you enjoy tinkering with your games, aren’t too attached to pretty graphics and aren’t too put off by the game’s basic liberal socialism, you’ll have fun here.

But that might be a lot of iffs.

The good:

Fun, clean layout and offers you a lot to do.

The bad:

It can look a bit cluttered at first, and can come off as propaganda.

6 / 10