Will hold interest for a while, but ultimately boring game.
User Rating: 5 | SuperPower 2 PC
Reviewer's Bias: I didn't play the original Superpower game, but I played Hearts of Iron (this will be important in a moment). I'm an economics geek and like to play games in order to figure them out. My main motivation for playing the game was to play as a small country and to raise them up from their bootstraps and bring them out of their problems. I played the game as Nigeria and then later Turkey. It was interesting to see how the economics worked and ultimately, I didn't think that the economics were modeled the best as inflation seemed to be based upon whether the government's budget was in surplus or deficit and not on whether the GDP was soaring. In one instance, once I figured out how to get GDP to grow like mad, the GDP in Turkey went up by 20% in a year and the inflation rate was around 2% because I was running a strong surplus. The game is a disappointment because it is billed as having three major components: economics, military, and politics, but after playing the game for 15+ hours, I got the feeling that the military aspect would provide the most entertainment. Economically and politically, there weren't a ton of true options and the game devolves into managing your sliders to optimize things on the homefront. Though I wasn't into this myself, the most fun of the game will come from invading other companies. Also, there were some features in the game manual that didn't make the final game. Two of those missing features were setting the minumum wage and peace treaties. Diplomatically, the game was a disappointment as you could initiate a treaty with one country and use conditions to determine who else was in the treaty, but you couldn't try to get two or three other specific countries to join the treaty. Also, I couldn't figure out how to join existing global treaties that were out there (unless my countries were so bad that they didn't meet any of the qualifications). Militarily and internationally, I don't think enough information is given in the game in order to make good decisions. I didn't know what consequences would be if I undertook certain actions (got caught spying or invaded a neighbor). There are global events and there is a ticker, but it didn't grab my attention like a newscast or radio program would. Other criticisms of the game are more or less valid. If you know economics, you can figure out how to grow your economy and once you discover this, the game becomes boring unless you want to take over the world through military conquest. The value for the game was good as it cost $30 and I played it for over 15 hours, but it really didn't WOW me. I did enjoy trying to figure things out and that was fun. Overall, the game is a slider game like Hearts of Iron and ultimately not interesting enough to hold my attention to try out the multiplayer aspect of the game.
