President Forever Review

Intro

I don’t think there’s a single person who at least once in their life hasn’t thought ‘I would like to be president of the country and change the way things are run.’ For those of us that can’t achieve that dream (vote me in 2048!), there’s this game.

The Story

It’s up to you to change the shape of the country for the next four years by running for president. You get to choose your running mate, which issues you want to campaign on, how to attack your opponents, where you want to travel and what you want to do once you get there.

Win endorsements! Spin the news! Create spies to plant in your enemy’s headquarters!

The Good And The Bad

Well, it’s all there. Traveling to each state to tell voters what you care about, creating a stance that coincides with the voices of the people of the country, choosing your running partner (I personally chose to run as John Kerry with Hillary Clinton as my VP), creating ads to run and drum up support.

Unfortunately most of it is rather dull. For someone who is very political I can see this being a very fun game to play and for me I did see how I could spend hours trying to figure out every nuance of this game to learn the in’s and out’s that would lead me to the white house but if you’re someone who didn’t pay that much attention to the last election or have no interest in doing so in the future, this game is going to be nothing but a big bore to you.

There aren’t any flashy graphics to really pull you in as most of the game is ‘point and click’ with some occasional text flying by to let you know how you’re doing and who is attacking you currently but I did get a big thrill every time a new poll was released and I got to see just how states I had taken away from the opposing parties (well, party since it’s pretty obvious the third party candidates were pretty pointless even in a virtual political arena).

Music

There really isn’t much to talk about in terms of bells and whistles. Occasionally a sound effect would pop up but I would have really liked the ability to choose a generic theme to have as my campaign song and the ability to target certain age groups with that song.

Overall

I was really hooked in on this game from the start because I was absolutely glued to the television and news during the last election and really fought hard to see my side win and so playing this game was kind of a nice little thrill.

For someone that is politically minded, this could be a fun thrill but there just aren’t enough features. What about designing a candidate? Or even your own party and trying to be the first third party candidate to win an election?

Maybe a future upgrade will include features that will bring in a more general audience but for now, only the real politics buffs will get a thrill from this and even they might get bored after awhile.