Quick Look: Democracy 3 – with Gameplay Video

After playing Democracy 3 for about two full hours, I am ready to be a little more forgiving of the various politicians and technocrats that manage to mess up the process of leading a country, a government agency or a state company.

The third installment in the series that aims to capture the essence of the democratic process is beautiful, informative and can offer those who are passionate about politics hours and hours of experimentation.

The core structure of the game may seem very complex at first, but it is actually pretty simple: a big screen filled with all the elements that the development team at Positech believes are important for a country to run.

Depending on game setup choices, some are more important than others, but any situations will have areas that are running smoothly and some problems that the player will have to address as long as he wants to remain popular and win re-election.

Much of Democracy 3 entails looking at the beautifully crafted icons and navigating from issue to policy and then to cause and effects in order to understand why a certain situation exists and how it can be improved.

The game clearly states that satisfying everyone is impossible and it quickly becomes apparent that it’s very hard to even deliver a solid budget and content country without breaking some kind of internal belief system.

I fought to eliminate inner city riots in one of my games and Democracy 3 gave me the tools to do that via generous subsidies and government regulated housing, but in the process, I managed to annoy all the capitalists in my country while also causing an overall brain drain.

Fighting obesity has been pretty much impossible so far, although I tried a number of measures linked to the agriculture department, and I have also had limited success in pushing towards greener overall technology.

Despite the setbacks, Democracy 3 remains attractive and interesting because it manages to cram such a complex simulation into such a streamlined form.

Take a look at Democracy 3 in action in the attached video.