Fate of the World review [PC]

Posted March 9, 2011 by Matthew Lee.

Fate of the World is a game about climate change. It’s educational. Would that be educational like Oregon Trail, so unintentionally funny the game’s going to end up reduced to a footnote on KnowYourMeme.com regardless of what people were supposed to get out of it? Or is it educational as in well-meaning but fundamentally dull, something you’d never play if you didn’t have to?

Fate of the World takes place in the near future, where a series of escalating natural disasters sees governments across the world hand over power to decide environmental policy to a new central organisation, the Global Environmental Office. As the head of the GEO you need to tell countries what they ought to be doing, trying to balance what they want with what they (and by extension the planet) need.

For every five-year turn you can play as many cards in each region as the GEO has agents there. Cards progress in branching tech trees; you start by establishing a regional office for a particular area of research, which opens up more options in that field. A welfare office gets you medical and educational policies, environmental the power to promote or ban the use of different energy sources and so on.

Some cards last a single turn, while others need to be left in play for much longer. Ongoing policies typically deal with much wider-reaching initiatives, and these are where you most often run into concerted opposition. People like it when you get them jobs, keep them healthy and safe from wildfires or flash floods, but not when you tell them they can’t cut down trees for farmland any more, they need to go vegetarian or use electric cars.

Juggling what they expect with what they need can be a very tough balancing act, especially since the first often makes the second that much harder. People want their transport to keep running and industry to work, for example, so if you deny them the oil reserves they know are there they’ll get mad. Yet opening these up means more emissions from burning fossil fuels, raising the planet’s temperature, meaning there’s even more you have to work to protect the populace from.
Any region that gets angry enough at you can kill your agents or even kick you out, denying you influence. While they might ask you back in time there’s no guarantee they won’t misuse whatever tech you’ve left them. If you’re not there to send in the peacekeepers, medical aid or famine relief there’s every chance they’ll start a nuclear exchange or worse.

Fate of the World is hard, sometimes intimidatingly so. You never seem to have enough time or money and people frequently demand everything at once. You can hire more agents in the early stages to play more cards per region, but that risks draining your money faster if you’re playing multiple cards that cost you every turn. You can focus on specific regions to start with but you risk the others getting angry you’re neglecting them.

And the game does feel rushed, at times. The first mission, which serves as a tutorial of sorts, is ridiculously easy and doesn’t specifically teach you much. There’s a wealth of infographics to show you precisely what your decisions are doing and a glossary for all the jargon, but the interface can take some getting used to and could use some more obvious prompts to the different screens.

The open-ended nature of the game helps mitigate this a lot, though. Even in those missions you’re supposed to be saving the planet you’re free to play to lose if you want to. The educational value stems more from simply playing Fate of the World rather than specifically trying to learn something from it. While it may seem obvious people don’t like being told what to do, the game feels like a pretty plausible evocation of how terrifying it would be to have to deal with this on a national or global scale.

It’s probably not going to have the same effect on people who don’t see the appeal of turn-based strategy, but it can be exhilarating first thinking how horrifyingly fragile the earth is – what one more degree of global warming can do – then feeling you’re getting on top of the effects, if only for a while. Alternatively, even playing like an ass, laughing as you kill everyone off, can still teach you something about what we’re doing or might do to the planet.

Fate of the World is neither a joke nor a tedious lecture, basically. It’s got faults, and it is selling a message that might put some people off, but it’s clearly made by people who understand how games work and who want you to have fun playing theirs. It’s a very stiff challenge, but like the best difficult games you can get as much out of trying to beat it as finally winning. And ultimately, it’s more upbeat than depressing: it’s saying the human race might still have a chance. Let’s hope that, at least, is realistic.