SuperPower 3 Review: Everybody Wants To Rule the World

Bringing a series back after nearly twenty years is always risky, even if the series had a huge fan base in the first place. Doing so when the originals had a cult following at best is a lot riskier, but I can absolutely see the appeal of a game like SuperPower 3. A geopolitical simulator, you pick a country and try to lead it to world domination. With a sandbox mode available that gives you complete freedom, or a series of scenarios letting you deal with a specific situation from your choice of the countries involved, SuperPower 3 is an incredibly deep game with more options than almost any other I’ve ever played. The amount of minutiae you can dive into is truly impressive, as is the ability to step into the leadership of 194 countries.

Outside of an interesting concept, however, there’s almost nothing nice I can say about SuperPower 3. I’ve rarely been in a position to play a game so fundamentally uninteresting. After creating your character, you’re dropped into a blank screen with a ton of menus to select from. No direction is offered, even in scenarios where you have specific goals, because, for the most part, it’s just to build your nation. Make your people happy, get your leader reelected, and improve your economy. While that level of freedom is nice, this leaves new players with absolutely no idea where to even start.

Lacking Direction

That’s a problem when you have hundreds of options, and it’s unclear what most of them do. I don’t know if I’ve ever played a game that cried out for a tutorial more than SuperPower 3 does, yet it doesn’t offer the slightest sense of direction. There are a few spots that link to an external wiki or some barebones Youtube videos explaining a few mechanics, but these don’t go into anywhere near everything players will want to know when starting out. The specific scenarios here would have been a fantastic way for the development team to onboard players, giving you more specialized goals that could be built around teaching a variety of mechanics specifically. Instead, players are simply on their own.

I wouldn’t fault a game simply for being hard to understand, though. Some niche games may not be for everyone, and there are absolutely people out there who want this level of customization.  If all it took was time to master it to really get into the game, then I could see it building a niche audience. The bigger problem, though, is that underneath all of the almost impossible level of things to learn, I’m not sure there’s a very good game waiting for players.

Your Public Awaits

At a certain point, with so many things to learn, I thought it might be fun just to play around with the mechanics I had grown to somewhat understand. I wasn’t going to take over the world that way, but I figured I could get a few laughs out of it. I started wildly moving my country back and forth between being a leftist paradise and a fascist’s dream. For two weeks, I’ve give total freedom to the populous, eliminate taxes, and open up everything I could. Then for two weeks, I’d move taxation to 100% and crack down on every freedom, completely close the press, and declare myself a literal emperor.

The public barely cared. I kept switching back and forth. Every two weeks, I’d swap between them. I’d throw a few tweaks into things now and then, but I kept going back and forth for months and months. Eventually, my leader’s support dropped down into the mid-30s, but I couldn’t seem to get it to go lower. I’m sure there are a few real-life trolls who would enjoy that sort of chaos, but it isn’t 30% of the country, and it certainly isn’t that high when you take the money aspect of things into account. People don’t play when it comes to money. Even worse, this ultimately caused issues with the simulation, and some settings stopped working. I’d turn elections back on, but the game would insist that the next election had already happened.

Performance Problems

It’s actually really hard to see the impact of most of what you do in SuperPower 3. The entire interface is incredibly bland, and little about it updates in real-time. This isn’t a game that ever celebrates your success or makes you feel good about what you’re doing. There’s almost no feedback at all. It makes what is here feel more like a series of settings than a game.

That’s before we even get to performance. Changes take forever to go through after you select them, load times are some of the worst I’ve seen in recent memory, and the game crashed on me multiple times, a bigger issue than with the average game because of those atrocious load times.

Conclusion

Some games are only going to appeal to a very specific audience. That’s great, I’m all for niche games, and SuperPower 3 should have been one of those titles. With the number of issues, it has, though, including systems that simply don’t seem to work, performance problems, and a complete lack of direction, it’s hard to see even the players who it should be for getting much enjoyment out of it.

Final Verdict: 1/5

Available on: PC (Reviewed); Publisher:  THQ Nordic; Developer: GolemLabs; Players: 2; Released: October 7th, 2022; ESRB: N/A; MSRP: $29.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of SuperPower 3 provided by the publisher.