Will you tell your voters the truth or will you be corrupt and sabotage your opponent to achieve your goal, being the next president? This ist the question you will encounter in Political Animals. Don't let you fool you by the graphics. This game is not made for children. It's a turnbased strategy game where you conquer staates/countries not by war as usual, instead you use politics to do so. You choose one of a few avatars and go on vote-catching with your lawers, spies, security men and so on. Every character has special abilities and traits like in an RPG. So you can achieve your goal in different ways. In my opinion the game has just the right coplexibility. It’s not as complex as Democracy 3 from the same Publisher. Democracy 3 has the way more micro management. Political Animals can be more compared with a boardgame, which makes it more accessible to a broader audience. This doesn’t mean that it is not complex at all. You have to plan carefully your next move by analysing each staates priorities and how you can cover them. If you don’t do that, you’ll loose the support of the voters, your party goes bankrupt and you can’t pay your party members, which results in, that they won’t do any more actions for you. The problem the game has is, that some people might be indisposed of this game. The game was released during the presidential election 2016 in the USA, which was very emotional for some people and they mac associate the game with the US election. In fact, despite the time the game was released, the game doesn’t have any other connection to the US election. It’s more a abstract voting system with no direct connection to a specific election system of a specific country. By the way, the game has some satire charme. I can recommend this game.
This game might not be historically correct in terms of the appearance of the vikings but the vikings werent in space anyway. So, who cares? :D This game is a nice puzzler with some rpg elements. The rules are easy to learn but the game is difficult to master. Your vikings always have to go on their lanes from the left to the right, not being able to switch lanes. The goals of the single levels are always different. For example to kill 40 enemies or to survive 4 waves of enemies and so on, so it's not always necessary to kill all enemies. You always have to fit your gamestyle according the goals you have to reach. Some levels also have modifieres, like every enemy has +1 life and so on. After the few tutorial levels the following levels will be randomly generated. This might be sometimes good and sometimes bad because the same level can be sometimes easier and sometimes harder. But on the other hand the replay value of a single level is higher and replaying levels is necessary to earn gold and experience poits to upgrade your vikings for the upcoming, harder levels. You also have to try to get as much gold and loot as you can. In your backpack you can collect items which can be also be purchased in shops for some gold. These items help you in the levels by for exmple recharging a special ability of a viking. Every viking has special ablities, which can be improved as they get more experience, like in a rpg game. An ability is for example to remotely activate a trap or to push an enemy one square in an specific direction. New vikings can be hired with gold. Some levels even require a viking with a specific ability, so you have to look where you can hire them. Also the enemies has different ablities and different behaviours when it comes to attacking. So you have to study them first and look how you can trigger a chainreaction. The game also has story. It's a nice extra to have one in a puzzle game but it's not really important. I like this game.
I liked Sorcerer King, because with the feature, the overlord is watching you, it brought some fresh air in this genere. Rivals brings some nice improvements to the game. It's just Sorcerer King with some new features. While this expansion is standalone you have to consider if these improvements are worth the price for you, when you already own Sorcerer King. When you don't own Sorcerer King yet, you may consider only buying Rivals. As already said, it's only an improved version of Sorcerer King.
