Reviewed: September 24, 2004
Reviewed by: Edward Noble
Publisher
Ubisoft
Developer
Stardock
Released: August 10, 2004
Genre: Edutainment
Players: 1 / Online
ESRB: Teen
7
6
8
8
7.0
System Requirements
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Texans for Truth. Fox News. Into this fray, Ubisoft released The Political Machine, an edutainment title about presidential politics. You are the campaign manager for one of the major party’s candidates post-convention. So don’t expect to have to carve out some platform that appeals to your base in the primaries and then be bound by in the election.
This is a weird game. I wouldn’t say it is fun, per se, but it is addictive. I have played this game for hours at a time with a horrible fascination as I claim my opponent is for sending jobs overseas. Furthermore, this game is anything but educational. Other than what you learned in 9th grade civics class, you will learn nothing in this game. It is sort of like claiming Risk is an edutainment title about war.
The game is organized around the week: a game as 41 weeks. Every week, your candidate has so much stamina, and can only make so many actions. Various actions consume different amounts of stamina, and so, the strategy is based on maximizing three limited resources: candidate’s stamina, money, and time until the election. Speeches consume the most stamina, followed by setting up a HQ, followed by setting up an ad. Any extra stamina may be redeemed for “political capital,” which you can spend hiring operatives or winning the endorsement of a political organization.
First, you must select a candidate. In campaign mode, each candidate has a ladder of opponents increasing in difficulty you must defeat. If you beat all ten opponents for a given candidate, you unlock hidden candidates you can then play. There is also an online mode and a fantasy mode where you can change the demographics of the U.S. and affect the importance of current political issues. All the modes have the same gameplay, however.
Your choice of candidate does not affect your political philosophy. All candidates start as neutral to all issues. Each speech and ad you run, however, moves your orientation for that issue. Also, people do not necessarily see your true orientation. If your opponent runs a series of ads claiming you support the war in Iraq, the people will believe it unless you counteract it with ads and speeches of your own. Your choice of candidate does determine your party and there are a few statistics that influence game functions, such as fundraising or charisma (affects how much of an impact your speeches and ads have).
The gameplay is much as you would expect: move your candidate from state to state and have him or her give speeches and fundraisers; build campaign HQs in states; hire operatives to undermine the other campaign or to aid yours. Yup, you can play dirty politics. No, it isn’t much fun.
While you have the ability to hire operatives, their effect is a percentage increase or decrease every week. So if you have a spin-doctor in Florida, he will increase your popularity by 15% per week. But you need not only worry about popularity in a given state, you must also be known. This is the awareness measure. At the beginning of the campaign, no one knows who your candidate is. Once you build a HQ, people will start to recognize his or her name more readily. Radio and TV advertising also has spillover effect on awareness in neighboring states.
The basic idea is to give speeches and run ads that appeal to your core constituency and to the independents in each state; you don’t need a consistent message nationally—the media doesn’t question when you support the war in Iraq in Texas and oppose it in California. You can also claim your opponent stands for anything you want. I had Hilary Clinton claim that Arnold Schwarzenegger was against new jobs (apparently the game designers don’t know that you must be U.S.-born to be President).
About halfway through the campaign, each side chooses a running mate whose only effect is to give a bonus to a campaign function. For example, Barbara Bush will increase your fundraising in whatever state she is in.
Finally, Election Day comes around and people vote. In battleground states, you occasionally get an upset since the in-game polls are ±3.5%, but generally a few weeks before the election, you know how it will turn out. One odd aspect of the game is that it is quite common to have the popular and electoral votes come out in different ways. I have seen this in about 50% of the campaigns I have run, which is unrealistic.
The opening is really quite good. Several scenes of the campaign—chewed pencils, half-eaten doughnuts, and American-flag themed ties and napkins—give way to the final scene: your candidate addressing a large crowd. It is artful, and sets an excellent mood. The final tallying of the votes by Electoral College (the familiar scene on the news where a state turns either blue or red) is also quite well done. Unlike a real election, the results are returned geographically from East to West and North to South, i.e., Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and so on.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game is not so pretty. The graphics are only acceptable on the main map. Generally, you can see what is going on, but in the smaller states, it is impossible to see anything very clearly. It gets even more cluttered if you are running a tight race in one state and you set up a lot of advertising campaigns—each ad has a symbol, so you can have dozens of symbols in one state. You also have operatives, which show up on the main map. In one campaign in Florida, I had so many people and ads going, that the entire state was blanketed in symbols—on my 24-inch monitor, they were indecipherable; on a smaller screen, it would be even worse.
On the bright side, the graphics are bright, cartoony, and generally acceptable—if you can make them out. The scrollbar on the top of the screen, similar to TV news scrollbars, informs you of the day-to-day doings of the other side. During major events, you will get a newspaper display of what is going on. And that’s about all the graphics there are in the game.
The musical score sets a nice mood. It is the typical style of instrumental score you heard in The American President and The West Wing. There is also a nice score for the final scene where the electoral votes are counted, but generally, the music is acceptable, but unremarkable.
This is a $20 game, but it is still not fun. It is however, strangely (and horribly) entrancing, and you may find yourself staring at your monitor blankly for hours contemplating how to take Texas as Hillary Clinton.
If you like politics, you will probably find this game is engrossing, if not fulfilling. It is the gaming version of snack food: it may not be good, but it is easy and you are likely to eat a lot of it when bored.