Political Animals, a cute political strategy simulator is now on Linux

Political Animals [Steam, Official Site], a cute looking political strategy game from Squeaky Wheel and Positech Games is now available for Linux.

Disclosure: Key provided by the developer before release.

Note: It's live for Linux on Steam, but GOG and Humble likely won't be up until tomorrow.

Want to see if you can do better than your current politicians? Political Animals will give you that chance wrapped up in a sleek package.

It may look cute, but the game has a surprising amount of strategy and depth going for it that I wasn’t quite ready for when jumping in. You will choose your candidate, your headquarters, your staff and more before you even get going. It has nowhere near as much depth as other simulation games, so it’s more for people who don’t have tons of free time, which is nice.

What I found quite interesting, is that your pick your opponent too and each AI will react differently. They AI can be a real bastard though, so watch out. If you think you can breeze through it without becoming corrupt—you should probably run for a real office.

The entire game is about winning the support of the island’s inhabitants in the space of a month, so games don’t tend to last too long. Each day being 1 turn, so each game is only 30 turns in total. You’re trying to gain as much influence as possible in this time by sending your staff around to different districts, as you attempt to influence the major Patrons in each district.

You have a number of actions you can perform in each district. You can have a rally about a specific issue to raise the citizens concern over it, give gifts to a Patron to gain more support from them and then start a campaign on the issue you raised to gain support in that district.

It’s one of those games that seems simple, but it will take you half the turns of your first attempt to really start to piece it together. Thankfully, there’s plenty of tutorial prompts, which all explain things in a clear and concise way so there isn’t too much confusion. This is what makes me a big fan of the game, the presentation is simply fantastic. There's nothing I hate more than walls of text for tutorials, but you learn as you go here with simple instructions.

During my first campaign my opponent was ahead by at least 50K votes and I was running low on money, so I desperately took a bribe to increase my funding and relationship with an influential Patron. The problem is that this was a rather scandalous action, so it could be discovered by the next day and reduce my support. Thankfully, I could pay a lawyer to sort the scandal out to not damage my reputation in what was a key district for me. My sneaky opponent fabricated a scandal against me anyway, which caught me totally off-guard and completely lost me a district, so it seems the AI is pretty good.

You also get random events, which can present a moral dilemma as you are given limited options, and the tend to always have a downside to them. It gives the game a good bit of extra spin on it.

I didn’t really get what I was doing for half of it with the AI constantly being one step ahead of me, but it’s an enjoyable game to learn.

I can certainly recommend this one, not only was it interesting to try out, but it worked without issues too. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.