Day 18 - The Political Machine 2012 and RAGE

The Political Machine 2012

This game has you taking on the role of a candidate for President of the United States of America in his or her campaign. Each turn consists of you moving around your candidate or other resources on a US map, and engaging in activities designed to help the improve the people's opinion of you, or lower the opinion of your opponent. One of the actions is setting up headquarters, which can help you can candidate awareness, money, political capital and PR clout. These are very useful, but very expensive, so you can't build too many of them. Other than that, you can start ad campaigns, conduct speeches and raise funds. All of these actions, as well as traveling, drain your candidates stamina. This, essentially, is what determines the limit of what you can do in a turn.

The point of these actions is to raise the awareness of your candidate, after all people won't vote for you if they don't know who you are, as well as the let them know what your political stances are. Each state has different top issues as well as a unique ratio of democrat and republican voters. Part of your task is deciding how best to brand your candidate on the local and national levels, and what states to target with your message. I placed a bit of effort into Florida, for instance, which my Republican opponent, Donald Trump, fought me on. I won Florida, in the end, which definitely helped secure my overall victory.

There's a lot to do, and in my 21-week campaign there definitely didn't seem to be enough time to tackle all of the issues, or even visit every state. Your stamina gets used up so quickly, and money was always tight too. And my opponent was always criss-crossing the country, which made me worried as I focused on one state per turn. I won decidedly, but that was a short game on easy. It still took a little over an hour. I do like this game, and I'm likely going to play it further, try some longer games, and see if I can engage in some longer elections. One thing that I haven't seen yet, and I'm not sure if it's missing or if I just didn't get there, is the candidates. Previous iterations of this game felt like they had more candidates, and as you won campaigns you unlocked more historical ones. You can always make your own candidate, but still, it's a progression / unlock mechanic that I really liked, which seems to be missing.

For a deeper look on this game, check out my friend ShinEmperor's Let's Play video.

RAGE

id software's latest title was largely ignored, but I had to give it a shot anyway. I've always been a fan of Quake and Doom, but RAGE is a bit different from those. Firstly, it deals primarily with humans, no demons or aliens from what I saw, and it also carries a much stronger narrative than I'm used to seeing in an id game. It's also much larger and more open. You start off the game being woken up from stasis in some Ark, and quickly make your way outside to a barren wasteland of a world. You're greeted by a local voiced by John Goodman, so you instantly know he can be trusted, and he gives you a lift to his settlement. What comes next is a series of missions that consist of driving to a location, getting out and shooting your way through things, ultimately reaching your goals. Once you've done all that, you'll zipline or shortcut out, ride back to town and repeat.

It may sound like gameplay is repetitive, and it probably is, but it's constantly engaging. The missions themselves are given to you by the locals and are usually something you want to do. The locations are varied enough, in my 2 hours of play I visited 3 or 4 dungeon-type locations, 2 towns, and lots of wasteland roads in between. The weapons are mostly standard, but feel powerful and reliable. You'll start off with a simple revolver, but later on you get a shotgun, sniper rifle, assault rifle and some other less technological weapons. One of the cool ones is a boomerang type device that decapitates enemies and then flies back to you. Unless it hits something and gets destroyed, that is, which happens a lot when indoors.

There's other mechanics that set it aside from your basic FPS. A money mechanic, which you can use to buy items, weapons, vehicle upgrades and ammo. Weapons have multiple ammo types that you can cycle through, with different uses, mostly revolving around added damage. Vehicles play a big part of this game, aside from the weapons and upgrades there's also races which come in three varieties: time trials, races and combat races (minigun and rocket). There's quests, side-quests, gambling and a collectible card game.

The game world is fairly linear, but is large and feels open, thanks to it's design. The game is very nice looking as well. I was able to run on the maximum settings at 60 FPS, which is nice too. At one point the game did warn me that I didn't have enough cores to enable "Texture Detail", but I didn't listen and everything turned out fine. There was a bit of pop-in as textures switch from low to high detail, but it's not too bad.

If I had one complaint, it would be the pacing. I spent so much time talking to people, traveling and exploring. I probably only spent around half the time actually in combat, or feeling any sense of danger. That being said, I really enjoyed this game, and I will probably come back for more.

Notes

I swapped TftD with TPM2012, which I had purchased after starting the challenge. That's right, I'm still buying games. I can't help it, I'm addicted to building my steam account! X-COM: Terror from the Deep will be played much, much later, when I haven't done an X-COM game in a long while.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 018