Play as the campaign manager for a host of candidates including real-life 2012 candidates, historical candidates or design one from scratch in this 2012 entry into the acclaimed political simulation game series. The Political Machine 2012 features updated political topics from across the United States. Issues such as Afghanistan, the economy, Obamacare, income inequality, gay rights, and the national debt have been integrated into the game’s election database. Regional issues such as “right to work”, state minimum wage, local environmental policies, farm subsidies and more require the candidate to walk a tight rope between appealing to the widest range of voters and appearing to “flip flop”.
The influential Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said that "Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory," and developer Stardock apparently hopes that holds true to gaming as well. The newest installment of their long-running Political Machine franchise still delivers the quick, addicting bouts of light strategy and roleplay that made the 2008 release so enjoyable, but at the same time, it's so similar that you could be forgiven for thinking you were playing the same game. It's thus a little tempting to see this lack of change as a critique of politics as a whole. But considering that Stardock also removed some features for this new release, it's hard to see The Political Machine 2012 as anything other than a step back for the franchise.
Still, The Political Machine does a good job of including almost all the major movers and shakers of the contemporary political scene as playable characters, but it’s regrettable that there’s no option to pull a Ross Perot and run as an Independent. The candidates themselves take the form of the same ever-grinning bobble-head figures from previous games, and their design manages to walk a fine line that inspires laughter without offending either side. Players of a Democratic bent will smirk at the oh-so-serious mug of Al Gore (complete with a pitiful charisma rating), and Republicans might enjoy boosting Donald Trump's famed toupee all the way to the nation's highest office.
It's a shame, though, that we're stuck with the rogues' gallery of contemporary political personalities ranging from Minnesota's Al Franken to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In the past, you could butt heads with Barack Obama as Teddy Roosevelt or as the evil alien Lord Kona from Stardock's Galactic Civilizations franchise; here, Stardock bows to dull reality and the game's personality suffers for it. Even worse, campaigns (as in the sense of a story) and their accompanying maps no longer exist in the single-player mode, so don't expect to ride your votes to victory in Lord Kona's Drengin Empire as you did in 2008.
System Requirements:
OS:Windows XP SP 2 / Vista / 7
Processor:Intel Core2Duo 3 GHz
Memory:2 GB RAM
Graphics:Shader Model 3 with 512 MB VRAM
DirectX®:9.0c
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