A politically incorrect satire text based roguelite game.
8 user reviews
8 Steam reviews
| LANGUAGE | AUDIO | SUBTITLES | INTERFACE |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | — | — | Y |
| French | — | — | Y |
| German | — | — | Y |
| Italian | — | — | Y |
| Russian | — | — | Y |
| Spanish (Spain) | — | — | Y |
Extremely simple game, some of the decisions you're offered are not very well thought out, and there's a random chance you will be screwed anyways. I had to get an unspecified amount of gold for an alien, an event that was forseen, and then my nation got wiped out by a meteor in an unforseen event which required 20 units of troops to maintain order from. So either way I was screwed in an unwinnable scenario. Sometimes the choices you have are duplicates as well, so there's no real decision making going on. There isn't much depth here overall, but what are you really expecting from a game that costs 1 dollar? I'm recommending this game just because it was fun while I played it, up until I lost anyways.
And to illustrate what I mention earlier about the game not being well thought out, here is one example: In this game whatever unspecified cabal that rules over everyone, wants to make it easier for the civilian populace to obtain guns... the thing is though the entire game you're balancing favour between the cabal and the people of your nation as a whole, and if you go too far one way the other side will kill you. But in this scenario, the cabal wants the civilian population they are at odds with to be armed, and easily so, whereas the civilian population will get mad at you if you don't ban them from having guns and therefore be incapable of revolt in any realistic scenario. Which all illustrates how absurdly overly simplified the issues presented in the game are. This is not a deep game, it's a 1 dollar phone game ported to PC.
Bad Government is an incredibly lazy RNG kingdom management game where you juggle 4 stats and every turn make decisions that increase (or more commonly decrease) some of those stats. Keep going through turns until one of your stats runs out and then it's over. It's like Dead in Bermuda, only incredibly dumbed down with crap pixel art and a deficient premise to even ancient games like Oregon Trail. So why is this garbage, worse than a free browser game, on Steam? Cash grab, that's why. Put trading cards and a low price on any garbage and people will buy it like it's going out of fashion.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, even worse, it only runs in mobile phone 9:16 ultra portrait aspect ratio. This is yet another insult to PC gamers.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Godot game engine/toolset (the 2D part, the 3D part is actually workable). The Godot 2D component is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).
Regardless, for all intents and purposes Bad Government might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Bad Government is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
There's a lot to unpack here, the developer breached Valve's guidelines just to embark on a series of confessions for their behaviour, all of which contribute to explaining how such a garbage mobile app ended up on Steam where it doesn't belong, [b]but excusing none of it[/b].
The developer claims this is their first time trying to make a game. If I went to a restaurant, got sick from eating bad food, and got told "The chef is new and has never cooked food before", would that make it okay? No, it wouldn't. The developer supplied a very valid reason why this should never have been put up for sale on Steam in the first place.
The developer admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game.
The developer both acknowledges that this is a mobile app (confirming that fact of my review without doubt), but seems upset about me pointing that out to gamers. The fact is that it's a mobile app, has all the qualities of a mobile app, was designed for the lowest common denominator of gaming platforms, and thus compares poorly to games designed for PC. The developer openly admits they shoved a garbage mobile app onto Steam. FOR MONEY. This is appalling. The developer knows what they did is wrong yet they openly admit to it.
The developer argues that Godots utter crap 2D engine is fine, and it was just his own incompetence that lead to this garbage game. Whew. So firstly... the developer knew this was below acceptable standards for PC but published anyway. This is not okay. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. Again, appalling behaviour from a greedy mobile app dev, who, in the same breath, insists this isn't a cash grab and also admits it's a badly made mobile app from someone who has no idea what they're doing but wants your money anyway. See the price tag on the game? That's proof this is all BS from the developer.
And of course, here's me giving the developer the benefit of the doubt and once more stating the fact that no decent game has ever been made with Godot's garbage 2D engine (3D engine is okay, but amateur devs don't know how to use it, it's too hard, so we get garbage mobile apps like Bad Government instead). Well, I'm still right, but the developer deciding to put the blame squarely on himself is fine... except none of this excuses the fact the developer knows this mobile app is of unacceptably poor quality [b]but published it anyway[/b].
None of this is okay. This is a disservice to gamers and to amateur developers who know what they're doing and don't pollute Steam with mobile app trash like this.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
Un jeu du même genre que Reigns, mais dans le monde contemporain. Etrangement d'actualité, d'ailleurs.
Version en français tout à fait correcte. Mais on s'ennuie très vite, avec l'impression d'un choix limité dans les actions proposées.
A fun click game. Try to maintain and increase your power while dealing with the opinions and concerns of your nation's %1, %99, and ocassional encounters with aliens and zombies.
Almost no story to it.
Version Française très mal traduite, rend l'intrigue et le jeu injouable...
Bonne idée de base pourtant...
还在调试期先留一个，以后可能会修改。游戏本身设定挺有意思，而且暗中反射了很多现实情况。不过到三级之后我发现读那些文字还不如直接计算数值，觉得对于辛苦写方案的人有点可惜，如果能更紧密联系就好了。
This game honestly is extremely stressful 24/7... But in a good way, it keeps you on the edge of your seat as you play through it. I feel the game is fair in many ways but I personally would like to recommed some things to improve it.. Now first before I say anything YES I do understand this is still in Early Access and is labeled as one but none the less these suggestions would be to help the game not hurt it.. (Unlike some other reviewers for other games)
First off the game has pretty terrible language throughout it, not in swearing or bad words but instead in-proper english, some words are not spelled correctly or dont make sense with the sentence.
Secound is the fact that theres lots of parts missing, the black boxes to the left of the elites and people dont have anything in them? I would suggest adding maybe a number between 1-99 to keep it simple for when the elites or people might attack.
Third when picking a specific person to represent you It would be nice to add a feature where you can switch between the woman or man, this probably wont make adifference but it can get pretty repetitive.
Fourth is some bugs I found while playing, the game had a few bugs where I reached power level 5 and never got the achievement.
In summary all I think this game needs is more diversity and a few areas to improve upon, more content would make this game a smash hit like the game 'Sort The Court'. Its a rather challenging games which can keep you entertained for about an hour or two and also has great re-playability value for it. And for the Dev I know it can be hard only having one person, but as the first person to review your game, PLEASE keep adding to it! Make it perfect in your eyes and keep pressing forward. This CAN be a great game and maybe even an Iphone and Android game???
~PLAYER
