I’m not anti-AI at all. I’m a dev and use it every day at work.

My problem is the tech choice. Electron means shipping a whole Chromium browser and running a simulation of 200 countries in JavaScript, mostly on one thread. That’s a bad fit for a grand strategy game, no matter who or what wrote the code. AI writes code fast, but it doesn’t make the architecture decisions for you. If you don’t understand basic system design and just go with whatever gets suggested, you end up with exactly this: a 3.6 GB install for a map and some menus.

And passion projects are great. Put it out for 5 bucks in early access and people will cut you some slack. Over 20 dollars is a different story. At that price I expect some actual knowledge and work.

A terribly mid game, but not for the reasons you think.

So firstly, the GAMEPLAY LOOP. Its an ocean wide but a puddle deep, with 5 trillion buttons that allegedly do things but to find out, if anything has happend your only feedback is consulting the witches coven or get a gentle side notification there are riots in the street now.

The gameplay loop is incredibly uninspiring of constantly looking at menus, with barely to no sound effects or feedback for anything you do. Well, this is a uber complicated spreadsheet game genre. It doesn't need to look or feel good. This is totally acceptable, I play aurora. But what you really should have is feedback when things happen. News articles, pop ups, notifactions, scant few of those.

I will cover this more in the AI section of the review but effectively, the UI and Menus are incredibly inconsistent, pooorly designed and lackluster. This is tragic when the ENTIRE GAME is UI elements.

Sometimes it will tell you a policy change, what poll impacts it will have. If it shows the impacts, it is EXCLUSIVELY approval impacts. If the congress proposes a law, they do so and you cannot see whats the impact if it passes or fails at all. On approval or.. mechanically....
NOTHING has stat blocks or even vague description of what it does. Will banning abortion for example, increase birth rates? I assume so, but the game never states that. This could be rather obvious to intuit but heyy, I dunno if the AI added that as a feature so a description clarfying it would help!!!

Two tier renters market pop up. What does that mean? Oh. Oh you wont tell me. Ok.

Theres a lack of descriptor for most things, and a bizzare thing the game does, which again will go into the AI thing I'll talk about later is every, little, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, thing has its own mechanic or feature. Mechancis and features stacked ontop of each other in perpuity. Protests? Theres a feature for it! You can oppress them, disperse them, contain them or whatever and all that raises a bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ numbers none of which is explained in anyway whatsoever.

But ok, housing. Housing has a massive variety of its own features. I built a ton of construction goods in my country. How does property tax rate, different laws, construction industry, cost of construction and interest rates impact housing supply? I DONT KNOW, its not explained in anyway and I have a very strong suspicion these numbers dont interact much at all but theres no way to tell.

I dont know how these back end numbers work, which is somewhat important. I do not need paradox style stats blocks describing a plus or a minus %, a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ descrpition that verifies "property taxes may impact availably housing units"

I dont know how simple or complex the back end calculations are.

Also notably the way the game does its calculation suck, every month theres a tick that everything recalculates and no menus will load. Even if you dont want to interact with anything. If you were in the middle of amending a budget it'll tell you to manually click discard as its out of date now.

What you obviously should do, instead of the weird thing you spend half the game with "the books are closed for april 2030. " as you wait for the calculation. Turn interactivity off on the menus and let us see the cached numbers from the end of the month. If the 20-60 seconds of number crunching is unavoidable, the least you can do is let us read our numbers while we wait.

Ok now for the AI use. The dev is open about it and not hiding about it.
Im not saying a game made with AI is inherently bad. In fact, this niche spreadsheet game market is small, and to have an awesome game its likely we'lll have to accept AI to make the cost benefit work here. I know for a fact the dev did not just say "make geopolitics game, make no mistakes" but what is an issue is when a dev takes their hand off the steering wheel and lets AI make design choices. There are plenty of weird ideas here that are clumsy, and make no sense.

For example, some things are per provinces, some things are not. Utterly at random. When you build goverment housing units, its PER PROVINCE. Ok. But when you fund 20 factories, they are in a etheral magical all around the place. Not per province. So ok? Why?

Kinda logically, these two shouild probably share design philisophy and UI elemnts?



The thing the dev isnt open about is how long they've been working on the game. They claim its like "dream game of 5 years" when... no not quite. The earliest post of them sharing the game is July this year. Before that, including a few months ago, they shared posts of some grim looking start up company tycoon game their making. This game has been in development for like 5-6 months tops? And it shows. I do not think enough thought, or play testing or QA when into this game. And this is super super important for a game with this much magic and simulation happening in the back end. How do I verify ANY of the calculations work like their supposed to? I have very little trust the game is doing it correctly.

Shortly after that teaser, instead of showing off the depth of the mechanics they randomly drop some admitedly pretty visualisation of a climate simulation when BRO. Your games core mechanics are not done cooking in the oven, what are you doing.

And to be clear, I really want a game like this, hell even this game. Id love the dev to respond and highlight where I'm wrong.

This game has the dubious distinction of being my first not recommended. Not because I did not enjoy the game, I haven't been able to get enough of it, but simply because I would not recommend people to purchase it in its current state, and certainly not at its current price.

Geoplanetical aims to be the best geopolitical simulator on the market, frankly not a very hard bar to clear. It is better, easier to play, and more understandable than Geopolitics Simulator, Realpolitik, or any of its other competitors, but many of the diseases which infects this niche genre is still there.

For one, there is so much under the hood. Too much frankly. While games like this forces you to learn about real geopolitics, real economics, and real international relations, the game does not effectively communicate what you need to do to achieve your goals or the connections between different factors affecting your economy and your country. For example, is the transport network flow the flow of my internal market or the flow of goods internationally? It is not clearly explained. Neither are sudden price spikes which tend to happen in the later stages of the game. Crude oil suddenly experiences shortages which the game DOES NOT TELL YOU if that is caused by transportation bottlenecks, supply lagging behind demand, or what have you. Made worse by the fact that what you can influence is seemingly entirely arbitrary. Why can't I sign a purchase/sales contract directly with another country? Why can't I make legislation that prioritizes commodities for internal consumption? Why are my banks going bankrupt and my companies going under? If it's a skill issue, fair enough, but the game doesn't tell me what I'm doing wrong and how I can push things towards the metrics I want.

Secondly, and I touched on this previously, many of the tools available to governments just aren't there yet. Its not just direct trading agreements, the only thing governments can subsidize are energy, nothing else. Not food, no subventions. There's no direct G2G Foreign Direct Investment. If the AI won't build a new oil well or a manganese mine, at least give me the chance to invest in that country and let me have a certain portion of the output at a fixed price for example. Aside from the EU and some other international organizations, I can't make a new International Organization. The AU, ASEAN, UNASUR, etc. Aren't here either. There's no mechanism by which a world power like China could build up parallel mechanisms of power that oppose the IMF, WB, or even the UN. As an IR Graduate, too many things of our current international system in this game are taken as a given, if not hard coded. I'm sure the developer would add more things, as they have promised, but it's not there yet.

Finally, there is the issue of AI. I read the AI disclaimer before buying the game, and I understand that AI is pretty much integrated in the workflow of every software and game developer out there nowadays, but frankly I don't believe that real world data integration was the only thing that AI helped with. The pace of the developer's updates and the fact that this game, at least by the dev's social media activity, has only been in development for no more than a year, also makes me more incredulous of the developer's claim.

Again, I don't much care if the game was vibe coded or not, but transparency is lacking here, and the data is frankly inaccurate. What do you mean Indonesia, an iron ore exporter, does not have any iron deposits? You're telling me the Congo, the source of the Katanga Uranium that built the atomic bomb, does not have any uranium?

This and the other issues I and others have brought up speaks to the larger issue that this game was rushed to market, and does not justify its asking price.

To conclude my review, other reviewers have made note that the developer generally engages with positive reviews over negative ones. To the developer, I ask you, don't do this. We all want this game and the genre it is trying to conquer succeed. There is immense potential in this game, but as it stands, I cannot recommend purchasing it at this time.