by Tabitha Akery

Created on: August 15, 2008   Last Updated: December 06, 2010

Congratulations on being the newly elected President of the United States in this game, Oval Office. Make important economic and policy decisions to keep the country relatively happy. Deal with impending crisis and unexpected events that plague the Oval Office.

Modeled after the current government plan, this game explores the decisions the President makes. Changing the economic factors for one issue causes a cascading effect for other related issues. A red background represents an impending crisis. Red and green lines show how the issues are interconnected. A red line represents negative influence and a green line is positive influence.

A certain number of political points are assigned at the beginning of the term. These points determine how many policy changes can be made. This makes the game challenging as only one or two policy changes can be made at one time. More points are earned after each time shift and is dependent on how well things are going. Only certain issues can be directly changed by the President. Time plays a crucial factor as some changes are immediate while other changes take time to implement.

Bars indicate the happiness factor of groups of voters. There are the conservatives, the liberals, the environmentalists, the parents, the farmers, and others. Red bars indicate unhappiness and green means the people are happy with the policies. At the end of four years, the people vote and decide for another term in office.

Oval Office has a nice opening screen with pictures of famous past presidents and future hopefuls such as JFK, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain. The graphs are well put together.

Most of the music is meant to be inspirational with the official Presidential music played at the beginning. The music also reacts to the good and bad events happening.

Oval Office is a basic strategy game. There is no action involved in this game, merely pictures and shifting from one screen to the next. The only action required is clicking on a policy and using the slider bar to change the amount of money spent. This is not a game for younger children. The tutorial takes a little bit of time to get use to. Understanding the complexities of the game are difficult. The game can easily get boring.

The appeal factor, being President of the United States, is good. However, unless a serious strategist, this game will fall flat for most players. Although, it would be fun to see the results of this game when played by the potential Presidential candidates. This is not a game I would buy. Because of the effort involved and the input of realistic features in Oval Office, I rate this game a 3 out of 5.

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