![]() Most of the actions you take are simply a numbers game, weighing up the cost of a project or activity and deciding if it’s worth it. For all that, however, Realpolitiks II’s core gameplay feels more like balancing a complicated spreadsheet than running a country. ![]() There are moments of humour to be found – I particularly enjoyed the dog advisor who grants a +10 bonus to your relationship with absolutely everyone – and a lot of the ‘story’, such as it is, doesn’t take itself too seriously. ![]() This is where the problems with Realpolitiks II start and it’s most easily summed up like this: the game just isn’t a lot of fun. If you read that list and thought ‘wow, that sounds like a lot of number balancing’, you’d be right. None of that is bad, in theory, but there’s a catch. For players with a more aggressive stance, you can create and control soldiers, vehicles, and spies to attack enemy states. At home, you can choose to run a vast range of projects to influence different country statistics, as well as react to real-time events presented to you by your advisors. Currying favour and investing money in your allies will strengthen relations and enable you to form alliances in contrast, aggressive actions like imposing embargoes will worsen your relationships dramatically. On the diplomatic side of things, you can interact with foreign countries either positively or negatively. Gameplay itself consists of deciding your political actions in a number of different ways. If you, as I did, worked through the first two scenarios making alliances and avoiding conflict, Nothing Ever Changes will thoroughly catch you off-guard. The lack of shared borders and extreme resource shortages, coupled with the sudden availability of land, completely change the possibilities of diplomacy or cooperation. Nothing Ever Changes in particular is a thrilling diversion from the norm if you’re tired of the other, more traditional settings. Every country has different starting resources and relationships depending on their general global standing, and something as simple as selecting a different starting nation can drastically change your experience with the game. It’s clear that a lot of development time has gone into designing these scenarios. ![]() There are no recognisable countries left and most of the landmass is reduced to empty, unclaimed wilderness. In contrast, the third scenario plays like an almost entirely different game. The first two scenarios are largely similar, although countries have different starting stats and there are some different decisions to be made. There are three starting scenarios to choose from: On The Brink Of Tomorrow, which is the ‘standard’ game mode that most closely resembles normal world politics Pandemic Aftermath, which models the world immediately following the Covid-19 pandemic and Nothing Ever Changes, which imagines a world utterly destroyed by war and disaster, with only tiny pockets of society clinging to survival. Players are given control of a country of their choice and are tasked with expanding their power. Realpolitiks II is a political simulation strategy game. There’s a lot to get into here, but to keep things fair, let’s begin by explaining the game is and what it does right, rather than dwell on the negatives. Unfortunately, this also happens to be the part of the game where the problems start. On first starting Realpolitiks II, new players are immediately going to be faced with the tutorial.
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