Customer Reviews

SuperPower 2

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Super Power 2 is a well built geo political simulation. The player can choose which country to control and guide it from a political, economical and military point of view. It is either possible to play a game without a specific objective or to choose predifined scenarios with a goal, for example guide Turkey to meet the economical requirement to join the European Union. However, I don't recomand this game for the following three reasons:

1) although the simulation is interesting it is not very involving

2) the graphics are extremely poor

3) the game, after a while, is affected by bugs that make it impossible to go on playing and even to save the game.

I was hoping for something like the classic Balance of Power or a strong geopolitical simulation like Hearts of Iron, but this isn't it. Gameplay is weak, with just a number of sliders you move around in some vain attempt to optimize the system. But you aren't given enough information about how the system works in the game or the manuals to make this interesting. It's not that the game is hard -- you can easily get your country in a stable and successful state -- but it's not very interesting. The military parts of the simulation are no better.

Even with the latest patches, the game has stability and graphic issues. I also came across several misspellings in dialogs and descriptions, not a serious issue, but it does detract from the overall experience.

At first, this game was "alright", and I must admit that I enjoyed the prospect of leading the world into global nuclear war. However, aside from single handedly conquering the world using "unorthodox" dipolmacy and rising China to the most powerful country in the world, this game is not very interesting. In other words: after about an hour, you're ready for something else. Aside from the lack of things to do in this game, it constantly crashes, and every patch brings a new, interesting set of glitches. At patch 1.3, everytime I tried to run the game, it would ask me to restart to "complete the installation", and I did this several times. I upgraded to patch 1.4, and I had the same problem, so I threw the game away (literally).

Basically, do not buy this game. Don't be tempted by the idea of "controlling an entire nation", because by "control", they mean "change a few values, illegalize a few religions/political parties, and that's about it", and by "realism", they mean "tax the people at 100% because they won't mind". If this is a "realistic geo-political simulator", then we are all doomed. Do not buy this game.

The concept behind Super Power 2 is great. You can basically take any country on earth and run it any way you see fit. If you want to try to run America as a military dictatorship or if you want to run Saudia Arabia as a multi-party, you can. The options are virtually limitless

You can produce commodities such as grain, meat, energy, ect. You can also build military units and even research new units

You can wage war on your neighbors, and while the battle graphics are a little cheesy, it gets the job done

This is not a game for the casual gamer who is looking for a quick game before dinner. This game is very in depth and demanding and some of the micro-management can become tedious.

Now for the bugs and let me tell you, there are bugs galore. The game is notorious for crashing to the desktop as well as saved games not loading. Even with the patches and tweaks, game stability leaves a lot to be desired. While Super Power 2 is a vast improvement over its predesecor (it does feature online play), with all of the bugs and technical issues, you may wind up wanting to nuke the game, instead of your neighbors

So is it worth $29.95? If it was not for all the glitches, crashes and bugs I would say yes. Until Golem Labs comes up with a solution, I would say to look for it in the bargin bin or 2cd hand

Excellent premise but this game is extremely fragile -- the least memory distraction makes the whole game lock up or shut down, and if you're playing in a LAN, it'll lock up all the computers linked into the game. Too much emphasis on military silliness to sell it to warmongering nerds. The designers would have been better advised to counterbalance the economic and political power and actions in the game, which would be a more realistic real-world scenario than the childish overtemptation for invasion and war found in this game.

Buggy. This game crashed on me every twenty minutes until I got the patch. After the patch it was nearly impossible to play. Nations would just go rogue and start attacking far away countries. What is the most absurd to me is this game just doesn't take into account the U.S. Navy's sole ability to project war onto other continents. All the Navies in the game are capable of sending their warships all around the world and with enough gun ships, they can sink a U.S. carrier. I've also tried playing as many African nations, and it's nearly impossible, their economies are too small and they have huge militaries they can't possibly sustain. They go bankrupt in a few years. Also, the oddest thing that happened after the patch was the elections. The Republican party started winning. And I don't just mean in the U.S.! Soon the entire world was controlled by the Republican Party. While the idea is kinda funny to me, it's completely unrealistic and a huge bug.
The only fun part is playing as the US and attacking small countries. You overwhelm them so much it's kinda fun. You can take Cuba in a week. But once you get bored having the biggest military, the game's flaws become much harder to ignore.

A major issue I have with this game is the fact that reccomended system requirements are 512 MB of ram. Minimuim is 256. It runs really badly at 256. The game is a brillent concept, especially if your into geo-politics. You get a real kick out how the game develops(classical realism-hence unlikely). But be warned, this game should come with a can of raid. Update----the game is now usable due to a number of updates which have been made avialable at the Golem labs site. I give it 4.5 stars now.

I had Superpower 1 and couldn't wait for this one to come out. When I first attempted to play Superpower2, the game had trouble starting do to having so many bugs. The bugs were taken care of with a number of patches over the years. I played this game for many hours trying different things with different countries. Most seem to talk bad about this game, but I enjoyed playing it! I would recommend getting the game and see if it's for you. Yes you could go on for days about what the game doesn't do, (like neighboring countries not getting angry for your massive build up of military units). The game is a starting point for other greats to follow.

This a very interactive sim with a steep learning curve. Has bugs, have to download a patch to get past the cd key. Will not appeal to everyone. If you like sims, and you like problem solving (a lot) this is the game for you.

Amazing game. Just wish it worked and did not overburden my old PC. But for the time it worked, I loved it. I wish they would make a part 3. I will try again when I fix my mac to run PC. It did have a lot of bugs though.