Democracy 4 (PC) - Early Access Review

Warning: The following article contains discussions on political ideologies and general opinions. Some links may contain vulgar language. Reader’s discretion is advised.

Right, time for me to get my Che Guevara t-shirt on and shout “Freedom for Tooting!” No, it is a joke, and one that most of you won’t get because you either weren’t alive in the 70s or don’t know Robert Lindsay for one of his best-known roles. I know there is a warning above the article about politics and opinions thereof, but I feel I need to say this outright: The Democracy games are a satirical gamification of very real and dark conversations. To put it delicately, if I were to take charge of a country tomorrow: Sex work would be legal and protected, drugs would be legal but incur a high tax, and health care would be well-funded.

Others would force religious education/re-education, have a heavily armed police force, spy on their people, and under tax and underfund everything else. That is the nature of the beast. We all disagree, shout, and curse someone else out, but that’s the point. A democracy is only as good as you allow it, as long as you give others a chance to say what they believe (no matter how stupid), you can debate it. That is a democracy. Calling someone a “transphobic woman-hating Nazi” on Twitter for their generalized minor agreement with a controversial figure on something wholly unrelated isn’t helpful. Neither is calling anyone a “lefty-liberal commie America-hating terrorist” for saying someone should pay their share of tax.

Right now, the political situation across the world is one that can only be described as volatile. There has been a global pandemic along with domestic and foreign disasters, collapsing economies, crumbling infrastructure, environmental catastrophes, prison overcrowding, education in the toilet, an aging populace with a wheezing healthcare system, and everything else. It is no wonder people are sick of it and want change. The second you attempt to please one group, you are antagonizing the opposing side with almost militant hatred towards you, the figurehead. It is no wonder politicians go into office bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and come out looking like they should be chasing Scooby-Doo around a theme park.

This leads me perfectly onto Democracy, a complex political simulation series that shot up in popularity in 2013 with Democracy 3. How complex can it be? You take control of a country, which currently in Democracy 4 is: the U.S., the U.K, Germany, France, and Canada. With your newly founded power, you have to solve all the problems. An obesity crisis, environmental disasters, a drug epidemic, high unemployment, political unrest, a housing crisis, and all your personal moral issues. You can tackle every one of them however you please.

There is a catch: You have 4-5 years to do everything before an election. You take turns and each turn is a three-month period, you can only do actions with the limited political capital you have on each turn, and you can be assassinated. Do you still want the job? Do you want to tax the rich up to their eyeballs? The capitalists will put a slug in the back of your head. Don’t think the environment is an issue? Green Peace will choke you to death with a second-hand charity-shop multicolored coat called “The Technicolored Rainbow Warrior.” It is not an easy job being on everyone’s hit list.

You can counter-act it all with police curfews, a strong intel unit, microchipping everyone, wiretapping, torture, ID Cards, detention without trial, and so on. However, what does that achieve? I don’t know about you, but morally that is a nightmare; I would rather simply tax plastic bags and be done with it. It kills two angry and venomous birds with one admittedly bloody stone after being reused so much. That’s what a politician needs to do, find the compromise that doesn’t get them killed but gets the job done the best way possible. At least you think there is a compromise for everything, and then you get into the heavy stuff: Death penalty, science Vs. creationism (in multiple forms), military spending, and so on.

If you are rational, the death penalty seems like a pretty cut and paste job. However, that is never the case. Some see killing any living thing as wrong and should never be done, but you also have people who hold the sanctity of life in high regard until it is someone brown, racially profiled, or simply wrongfully accused. The world is a tricky place, and some see that death of one person in prison as a “worthwhile sacrifice” to keep what they believe to be holy and pure. Though it is never just one, and it is never perfect. We’ve seen it time and time again, someone is wrongfully accused and killed, only for the evidence to show they were the wrong person.

“Well, it is better than keeping them in an already overly crowded prison in the first place,” It is the cause you want to attack, not the effect. Decriminalize some drugs, and that will free up some space; Properly fund the prison service, and take a strong and hard look at the science behind the racial bias in many cases. It is not perfect, and it is not easy. That is how this whole government and political mess works. It is messy and not fun to look into. So far, I’m only scratching the surface of one little branch of politics you can play on fixing.

The second you touch welfare or tax, you’ll have one group or another rattling down your door with a hail of gunfire. Some of the public services and laws therein are a mess of a conversation only psychopaths want to have. Some of it is less contentious, of course, especially for education, which everyone agrees is a good thing. However, some want a better education system without another penny being spent on giving teachers a proper wage, updating textbooks, providing proper provisions, or even feeding the little sprogs. At the end of the day, I’d sign “The Right to Die” bill just so I wouldn’t have to do the commute home.

On the whole, Democracy 4 is similar to the previous releases of Democracy 3: Africa and Democracy 3. Continuing from the addition of the deeply confusing ritual of genital mutilation, there are further examples of gender equality with gender transition laws. These things come along with other policy additions, making it slightly larger and more up to date. However, the policies in place are no longer your only way of swinging voter’s opinions.

Now as you lead the campaign trail, you are giving an opportunity to give speeches, make manifesto pledges, and do some media stunts to show you are a compassionate, strong, or trustworthy leader. Not only that, but you will gain and lose big party donors to your actions alongside voters. It is a tangent, but Australia has the right idea about implementing compulsory voting. That doesn’t mean you have to vote for one of two candidates, it means you have to give your say if you’re of the legal age… and instead of a stupid little badge, you get a democracy sausage. You can write swear words over names and get your sausage, which is called a spoiled ballot, and big tent parties hate when you do that.

Give people the day off, give them a sausage (a vegan one if they like), and tell them they can write whatever they like on the piece of paper, that will turn out some voters. Well, that and heavy fines or prison time if they don’t vote, I’ve not decided which yet, but it will be in my next manifesto. You want to write the Stonecutters lyrics, so be it! If you want to draw a penis, that’s fine too, as long as what you feel is counted.

I digress, the only things stopping you from getting your goal of solving the countries problems are: Assassination, your lack of electability, and your term limits. You can solve the last one, extending your reign of terror into a several-year run, but that raises questions of its own. Though the game might be turn-based, you still have this ticking clock to contend with, and time will always catch you in the end. This is where it is complex, your limited time and limited capital are just one small part of it.

In truth, the game is little more than a spreadsheet akin to Football Manager. It is basically Football Manager for nerds like me. Strip away the nice UI (which I’ll get to in a minute), and all you are doing is trying to balance numbers. It is a minor goal when there are health crises to take handle of, but you’ll have to balance the expenses and income of the country to beat down some of the national debt. Taking some money from one place and putting it elsewhere seems simple, but you’ll always get assassinated or voted out for being too heavy-handed.

You might want to give the disabled money to build ramps, but someone doesn’t like it when you give a group of people a couple billion to improve their lives. The same could be said of just about everything. You want to be Robin Hood, you’ll be more like Robyn Hoodlum from South East London, ducking and dodging every bullet coming your way. Protect the rich and their co2 emitting companies? Green Peace will get really peaceful on you. It is not just them, those of the holy covenant of not understanding their own religion will kill you if you don’t please them at every turn. The number of times I’ve been shot at by a priest, you’d think I was playing Bloodborne.

Joking aside, there has been a concerted effort to dull the stark white (and off-white) backgrounds of 3 and Africa, with the now readily adapted darker backgrounds. Akin to what YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites have been adopting. That along with a single aid for colorblindness, can give Democracy 4 a bit of a different look. This also brings me to the ability to change how you view policies; Before they were set, now you can confuse yourself by ordering them by value, influence, finance, and weight. Now you can roughly memorize where everything is, then entirely confuse yourself.

Unlike Democracy 3, you may have noticed the groups you are trying to please sit on the left. It is a bit odd at first, but you can now order them alphabetically, by the number of people involved, or their happiness with you as the leader. You can, for the most part, ignore this as I did, and go on as you mean to with policy changes based on moral obligation instead of running for votes. It turns out you can win a U.S. election by: Getting rid of the death penalty, banning guns, fully funding the healthcare system, taking steps toward ratifying climate change, providing proper education, and giving the disabled some money to build a couple of ramps to make their lives easier.

All this gleeful pontification aside, it is more of the same with improvements overall to the systems and new scenarios. If you are (like I am) oddly enamored with this series of fancily fixing a political spreadsheet with random events, you’ll be getting more of the same with updated references. I do mean more of the same, as Democracy 3 did have a bit of a tendency for crashing or being a little bit buggy. To say I’d never encountered any crashes or bugs in Democracy 4 would be a politician-sized lie.

As the game is currently in Early Access, there are a few extra bugs that I, and I’m sure others, have found in abundance. They are not game-breaking, or rather more game-breaking than the save scumming of before, but are pronounced nonetheless. I know that I’ve hovered over things a few times, only for the box surrounding the information to slowly slide away to the left and get smaller. The other noticeable issue is in the campaign speech selection, on the light background settings the text is unreadable; Other sections appear similarly on the dark backgrounds. These issues are minor in the grand scheme, though annoying nonetheless.

Overall, while Democracy 4 does have minor bugs, the same crashes as before, and insignificant spelling mistakes, it is still that Democracy gameplay feeling of power. It is just a spreadsheet of numbers underneath all the understated graphics, but it does more to decisions than most with both growing and instant retaliation for your actions. Though some mistake its real-world setting and very real life-altering laws as something to be taken seriously, it is in some sense a very dark and humorous political game. Yes, Prime Minister, you can bomb “Bong Bong land,” but you’ll have to find it on the map first.

A PC copy of Democracy 4 was provided by Positech Games for this review.