Vox Populi: Australia 2025

This is painful,but I cannot recommend this. This game has been on my wishlist for almost a month. Today is our federal election, and it almost feels as though it was rushed to meet the deadline. Tool-tips didn't show up or were delayed, politicians changed gender mid-sentence (place Sandra on activity Y by dragging her from his place on your team), it spoke of municipal elections rather than local councils, and our Head of State calling for a snap election. Our Head of State is actually King Charles, who is functionally unable to act in such an overt manor over any country. Generally our Prime Minister would call for an early election, or the Governor-General could call for dissolution. This all felt very un-Australian. There probably weren't even democracy sausages. Dunno. If there were, I certainly didn't get that far. I see a lot of promise, and the political manoeuvring was interesting, but it's neither ready nor localised. Also the game crashed twice attempting to start the main campaign.

It's a Vox Populi game, so it's pretty fun. Play the Europa one first if you are new to the game series, as that is the best introduction in my opinion. The new post-apocalyptic scenario needs some more cooking. The ability to kill other candidates through a vote is fun and chaotic enough for a side mode, but the fact that those laws are one-off limits the amount of strategy that can actually be put into those decisions. The dread mechanic, however, is just kinda lame? I only played through it once, but it just seems to screw over late-game AIs and acts as an annoying roadblock for otherwise successful players. There's some problems that also apply to other Vox Populi games, like ideological weights seeming pretty useless and rushing PP early game for a maxed out team seeming like the only feasible strategy. The Vox Populi games are pretty fun so I don't want to downvote but this game's "new feature" is a fun but so far unsuccessful idea.

First. I already won the elections. I like Vox Populi games but we need more things like upper house, more advanced coalitions or electoral thereshold.