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Alright, I just tried a somewhat older Indie game recommended by a friend, and I felt suitably entertained that I'm going to recommend it to Dakka.
It's not an action game by any stretch. This is a social-political-economical simulation of a country, and you're going to see lots of buttons, charts and tables. Do not be alarmed by the game's main interface, however - it looks messy and cluttered at first, but is surprisingly intuitive, and I would expect most adult gamers to get used to it within minutes!
The basic idea of the game is that you've just been elected into office as president of whatevernation. Each country has its own set of issues that you will have to tackle, ranging from stuff like crime to pollution to debt all the way to being a backwater banana republic full of illiterate drunkards. Each problem is connected to at least one source, and often to various effects. Most often, these sources and effects are themselves connected to other things, and so on and so on, resulting in a complex web of things influencing each other. Your task as leader of the nation is to finetune the things you actually have some influence on, and/or introduce/cancel policies that further have an effect on them, all the while keeping in mind that you've got to appease voter blocks so you'll get re-elected.
For example, crime is caused by poverty, which is caused by unemployment, etc... Crime also has an effect on street gangs and violence, which in turn affect people's health and happyness, etc... Crime can be countered by either addressing what leads to poverty, or by strengthening your police force either by increasing spending or passing new legislations. This is a very simplified example, mind you - there are some more factors than just the ones I just mentioned, but this only means you'll have more options, right?
In my first game I picked the USA and, in spite of my usual political beliefs, embraced capitalism in an attempt to tackle the huge debt. In this I actually succeeded, with the nation running a budget surplus of several billion dollars slowly chipping away at the national debt, which allowed me to lower corporate taxes further and, together with abolishing a couple worker's rights and sending troops to some other country in order to secure the oil trade, trigger a boom in economy. Unfortunately, my laissez-faire policies then resulted in a huge pollution problem, which after a few years saw the birth of an eco-terrorist group (well, violent activists, but let's just call them eco-terrorists) who even tried to storm the parliament once! In order to deal with the sudden increase in unrest I extended Detention Without Trial from 30 days to indefinite and had police officers patrol the streets with SMGs as standard sidearms. My intelligence network was already "maxxed out" because I had increased funding to the agency months ago to combat internet crime. Sadly, the next election saw me get voted out of office. The economy was running so well, but it seems I had pissed off too many voters with bills like banning creationism from schools. It was a close run, but the other party won by ~8% or so. Just as I was about to introduce mandatory ID cards for everyone dammit!
Bottom line, you can pull a whole lot of fun shenanigans in this game, and the amount of policies you can enact is ginormous (depending on the condition of your nation and your political power!). Give it a try, you can download the free demo here:
http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy2/index.html
Also, here's a Let's Play video series, rather fun to watch thanks to the guy's commentary and reaction to certain events ("I'm sure nothing bad will come out of this." *clicks next turn* "ONE PARTY STATE?!")
Democracy is currently on sale on Steam. 20% off if you buy within the next ~10 hours or so!
ExNoctemNacimur wrote:Can you send in the military to shoot at protesters a la African dictator?
That's a good question - I've been playing a few rounds on and off so far, and I keep discovering new policies to implement.
I pretty much pimped my ordinary police to be the military and passed a few bills that had the country run on what can only be described as martial law (hey, there were two violent political groups active in my state - one of eco-hippies and one of religious nutjobs), but I have not yet found anything that enabled the actual military to be deployed within the state. I've sent soldiers abroad twice, though.
