Inside Social Games

A new game called Geopolitics combines interesting concepts from MMO and Strategy games, but unclear game mechanics still leave something to be desired.

Geopolitics plays and looks like a very old school RTS – you are presented with a world that has scattered resources about it. Centered on your screen is your “village” in which you must enter and start constructing buildings as you would in any other strategy game. When not building, players gather resources by clicking on nodes and sending workers to gather from there while on the world map.

In fact, while on the world map you can scroll around to see all the other villages owned by other players (though it is easy to lose sight of your own town, making it unbelievably annoying to find it again). You can even form diplomatic missions towards them, but honestly, what fun is that? It’s much more entertaining to attack (hence the strategy aspect), but of course attacking also means enemies, and seeing as how this is an MMO of sorts, the game basically becomes an strategy free-for-all. However, when we get past building, confusion sets in.

Along with attacking, the majority of the buttons on the world menu have no explanation whatsoever. In fact, that’s the number one problem with Geopolitics: Other than building structures, it’s hard to figure out what or how to do anything. This issue of confusion is compounded by the fact that there are dozens of different features in this game such as the trading of goods via markets, incoming troop reports, outgoing war, and more still. It is just far too much to swallow, and the player ends up learning through trial and error.

The fastest way to turn a player off to any game is to put them into a situation where they feel overwhelmed. Luckily, this game seems rather slow paced so there is no sense of urgency, but there is also so much information to figure out, that the player just decides they have something better to do. They logged on to the game to play a game and be entertained, not to spend time figuring out the subtle nuisances that have been hidden by the designers.

Geopolitics is not a bad idea, but even the greatest idea can be considered madness if not communicated effectively, and the case here is a serious lack in communication. The game just doesn’t teach the player much at all about the game beyond building up the town, and leaves most of it to trial and error. One should never assume that a player will know how to do something, nor that they will “figure it out.” When it comes to starting a new game, they want, and need, to be told exactly what to do.