An alright game that gets old before you can say 'exit polls'
First I'll talk about the game play. It is pretty much what you would expect from a presidential campaign sim, you go from state to state raising money building HQ's holding rallier running ads. At first, the wide array of options seems like it would make for great replay right? WRONG! After losing my first campaign mission trying to play the 'right way' running as a republican and going with the republican base and issues. I lost pretty bad. On my second game, I realized that when picking speeches, commercials and ads. There are ads that appeal to everyone and ads that damage your opponents reputation with everyone.
Basically all you need to do is: Hold a bunch of rallies in california, texas, and other high pop. states. then just run commericals saying 'I support the economy' and 'My opponent supports high gas prices' and it works.
It feels totally unrealistic that you can run constant ads saying your opponent supports high gas prices, supports terrorism and stuff like that, without backlash.
In my second time playing, I won every, EVERY state, on a campaign that was strictly based on running 2 types of commercials. It boggles my mind that the devs put in these 'perfect' campaign ads, that make ads like 'I support drilling in ANWAR' that are more controversial, useless.
The game has another feature that lets you go onto a tv show for an interview. This would be cool, except that the interviews consist of 2 questions only, with answers that are so blatantly right and wrong that it makes the whole thing useless.
The killer for this game is that once you finally win an election, the next step is running that same campaign, except against another opponent. It's like if you took the first mission of an rts game campaign, and made the player play it over and over and over again, with the only difference being the colors of the enemy units.
This game is a good way to spend a few minutes,but once you realize that it is incredibly easy if you stop playing like you're running a campaign, and start playing like its just another lame game.