Review 1
Purchased!
I really wanted to like this game. As someone who played both This is the
Police, I really enjoyed the narrative and writing of both games, and bought
this game almost solely on the fact that it had people from TiTP involved in the
writing. Unfortunately, while the game shows a lot of promise, there are some
very glaring issues.
1) You don’t know who you are, as a character. The introduction is particularly
rough due to this, since you find suddenly “find out” that you’ve had a gay
lover, killed a young girl on an accident, have a hidden son, and used to run in
a gang, to name a few. All these details are mentioned with all the subtlety of
your wife telling you “By the way, let’s send some money to the woman who is
pretending to be the mother of our son". This makes getting into character very
hard, since you get constantly surprised by these elements you should know from
the get go. Even plot dumping you with all the details at the very beginning
would have been better than this, I think.
2) The game can’t pick a tone to save its life. Even though TiTP had moments of
levity, it took itself seriously and you knew what to expect tone-wise. Here,
the game is constantly pinballing from serious, to satire, to straight up
ridiculousness. One minute you are deciding on whether to rescue a military
submarine on Cuban waters and dealing with the potential international fallout,
the next you are helping the Chinese government develop an algorithm to censor
the internet because its leader doesn’t like the memes about him, and the next
you’re breaking an illegal turkey fighting ring.
And even though the game reached some semblance of balance from the mid game
onwards, it proceeded to go full ridiculous in the final act and destroyed any
kind of investment I had in the story.
3) The game lies to you. It could have been just an unfortunate coincidence for
my playthrough, but the Persuade/Bribe/Use evidence interface that is shown in
the game’s store page (For reference, the screenshot with Senator Dickenson) is
only used once in the game. Throughout the game you get a substantial amount of
potential blackmail material that can be sold for money or used against someone
(Or so you’d think), but save for one time, there are no instances of the
latter. This is especially rough considering there are several pieces of
evidence regarding the main antagonist of the game, but they never come into
play.
4) Money and costs are seriously unbalanced. Even though your first employees
are relatively balanced in regards to salary, any other employee has a base
salary at least 10 times higher than them, and they have no qualms on asking you
to double, triple, or even quintuple their salary, resulting in employees easily
costing you several hundreds of thousands of dollars a month each, with
potential monetary gains that grow nowhere near that rhythm. And in true genius
fashion, a lot of missions that can increase your monthly revenue stream are
gated behind having a significant capital to begin with, so it’s very easy to
get yourself in a loop of “Can’t accumulate money, so I can’t do missions to
increase my monthly revenue, and my team’s salary demands increase, so I can’t
accumulate money…”.
5) Every month, you get a lot of minor choices that give you a Yes/No choice,
with minor impacts on approval/money, but most of them are completely
unpredictable when you’re playing for the first time: Do you agree to give 100k
to organize a fundraiser to feed poor people on Christmas? Your reputation drops
because you’re flaunting your wealth. Do you agree to shoot a bunch of civilian
drones that are writing PRESIDICK in the sky? Your reputation rises because
people liked the “fireworks”. Ironically, choosing the most counterintuitive
options usually gives you a better chance of a good result.
TL;DR version: Even if you’re an ardent TiTP fan, don’t waste your money on this
game. It’s not worth it.
Review 2
Purchased!
Terrible writing, and the soundtrack completely missed the mark, at one point
the game was playing a happy song while the quest I was reading was about a
school shooting that killed mutiple children.
Review 3
Purchased!
6/10 Would recommend
Pros:
-Wonderful tough-in-cheek humor that balances out the game's seriousness well
-Decent replay value; there's many different avenues to achieve your goals
-Thought-provoking storyline, and honestly a sadly accurate depiction of the
American political system
-Actions have consequences; although they don't always feel good, they make
sense with how politics and media works
-The gameplay is remarkably simple, and most of the game is in your choices, as
this is a "choose-your-own-adventure" style game.
Cons
-It gets really frustrating trying to make a good choice and realizing there are
no good choices. Sometimes even the choices you think would work out end up
being catastrophic for absolutely no reason.
-It's a little too realistic at some points, and it's kinda scary (didn't we
literally just have them find cocaine in the White House in real life?)
-You have to do a ton of micromanaging to get everything accomplished. And
there's no way to even try to divvy out the responsibilities like a real
political official could
-It gets rather repetitive at times while you're waiting for another big
political option to come around
-You cannot go through this trying to play purely good guy, because you're
already a corrupt PoS. You will have to make evil decisions.
In Summary:
Every dollar you spend on a game should be at least 1 hour of entertainment.
This game is definitely worth the purchase to play through, especially if you
can grab it on sale. Don't expect anything life-changing, but it's overall a
decent game to play between Skyrim runs.