April 10, 2013

Horse 1461 - EA Politik '13 - It's In The Game

EA Sports - It's In The Game - Because Politics is A Game

The big thing in Politik '12 was Major League Politics and the fight to get either Obama or Romney to with the Presidency. Winning with Romney would always be a challenge for the player, as Romney himself would keep on spitting out self-destruct barbs like the now infamous "47 percent" bomb, which would ruin your game almost instantly. Then there's always the bias that an incumbent President always has.

Politik '13 comes with a whole new suite of in game mechanics. You can have leadership coups and caucus spills, you can even try to get the Indies to help you to pull off a no-confidence option if you've picked the Coalition.
There appears to be a glitch though. If you try to run a leadership coups but haven't selected the candidate in advance, they won't run; not even if they are a former PM. 

Previous things like the Tea Party in Major League Politics and Occupy have been replaced with newer graphics, and options to instantly promote outsiders to the Senate if your party already owns the seat in the Oz-League. You can even download "classic" players to fill Senate seats, such as former State Premiers.

The wacky parties make a return to Politik '13 like Katter's Australian Party, Wikileaks and the Democratic Labor Party which you'd think aligns with the ALP but doesn't.
In the Brit-League, there isn't really much to do except try and force a Tory/Lib-Dem split if Tory policies become too cruel and there's a demo mini-game in which you run a campaign for the SNP to split Scotland from the UK.

There's a few Euro leagues like Italia which has four main parties but is still ungovernable (you're better off with a Democrat/Freedom coalition), and the Deutsche League whilst not as chaotic has six main parties but a CDU/CSU/FDP coalition will usually be enough to win, provided you sort out the strange currency puzzles in the game.

You still may wish to buy Politik '12 though. Whilst it's still on the shelves, most of the functionality of '13 is in  there and it's going cheap.


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