RealPolitiks 3: Earth and Beyond
Review
A broken, bug-riddled catastrophe that isn't even fun ironically...
by Dan Lenois
reviewed on PC
Responsible governing
The core tenants of Realpolitiks 3 gameplay fall under four main categories: Commerce, resource management, governmental policy, and international relations. While military combat does also play a supporting role, it rarely played any substantive part in the various saved games I played through. One needs to invest to ensure stability and growth, but simultaneously you also have to worry about potentially accumulating national debt.
Crime and poverty are statistics worth monitoring, and should you ignore the expressed needs of your people, you risk your national stability flying apart at a moment's notice. The fact that the player is free to select any starting country they wish, each with their own advantages and disadvantages based on their real-life counterparts, adds to the immersion factor. However, these are where the positive attributes abruptly end.
Communicating your message
As with any strategy game, how game mechanics are represented and accessed in-game is as important as the mechanics themselves. The UI in Realpolitiks 3 looks like an unironic recreation of those cluttered videogame UI memes that exasperated gamers so often share across social media. It can take several hours to even begin to thoroughly understand the what, where, and why of each mechanic, which the game's limited tutorial tips barely help to clarify. Only after about 10 hours in-game did I feel I had any idea what was going on. While I'm all for slow, gradual learning curves in RTS games, said learning curves should be because of the mechanics' depth, not due to inexcusably horrendous visual communication from the UI.
Programming anarchy
Realpolitiks 3 is a fundamentally broken, borderline-unplayable game. In the process of preparing for this review, I have had five consecutive save files auto-deleted by the game for inexplicable reasons, and more recently had two newer save files corrupted.
The game is very prone to crashing. In my last session, it froze up on eleven different occasions and hard crashed twice. To say that Realpolitiks 3 is a catastrophic cacophony of technical failures and programming incompetence would be putting things mildly. Not only is this game not worth paying for in its current state, the developer should arguably pay its playerbase for putting up with this internal playtest publicly masquerading as a commercial game.
Final Verdict:
I have been hungry for a mechanically-rich political simulation game for quite some time, one that utilizes a real-world setting and offers compelling economic, militaristic, domestic, and foreign policy gameplay.
RealPolitiks 3: Earth and Beyond may claim to sate that appetite, but swallowing its current current offering is comparable to prison cafeteria food. It may technically offer something, but nothing that will leave you in any way satisfied. It is unlikely any amount of post-launch patching will make this game enjoyable, but hopefully one day it will at least become marginally playable.
3.0
fun score
Pros
You can play as any country you want, but it won't make the gameplay any more fun...
Cons
Constant crashes, corrupted saves, poorly-communicated mechanics, horrible UI design, etc.