14 DAY TRIAL // 
Masters of the World – GeoPolitical Simulator 3 is a very ambitious title, the kind of gaming experience that wants to offer a detailed look of the entire world, allowing a player to choose a favorite country and then make decisions that impact its long-term success.
I am a veteran who has played Democracy since the second full version and Hearts of Iron and Crusader Kings since they were first launched, but I was a little scared by the scope of the title from Eversim.
Unfortunately, the actual game experience cannot match the impressive initial pitch and it quickly becomes apparent that the game is too big and too focused on simulating everything to actually offer a good gameplay experience to those who try it out.
The premise is simple: choose a country, decide what you want to do with it and then implement your ideas while seeing the entire world around you react to your decisions.
Everything can be controlled in the chosen nation, from the power of its military and the rate of taxes levied on citizens to the way it treats marijuana legalization and thorny issues like retirement and long-term care for the elderly.
Gamers need to interact with other countries, signing contracts or launching military invasions, and they also have to worry about religions, international organizations and famous artists and intellectuals.
Masters of the World – GeoPolitical Simulator 3 is huge and a player can easily spend hours just surveying the state of the world as it stands on the start date and evaluating the possibilities of the long-term simulation.
But as soon as you actually run the game, the mechanics start to break down and I never felt that the title gave me actual options and interesting choices.
It’s hard to play the Eversim-created experience and to enjoy it, mainly because it’s never perfectly clear how some tasks can be achieved and what effects a number of player actions have.
Masters of the World – GeoPolitical Simulator 3 might be a strategy title that does not focus on graphics, but more fidelity and more attention to detail is urgently needed in order to keep the player interested.
The colors are weird, the map moves sluggishly, the various menus are hard to use and the interface never manages to deliver all the information that a player needs and makes it harder than it should be to implement policies.
Eversim could learn a lot from Paradox Interactive and from the way that company evolved its core mechanics and design to appeal to a wider group of players.
The music is also more of an annoyance because it fails to capture the very serious nature of the game and the other sounds included in Masters of the World – GeoPolitical Simulator 3 also fail to inspire gamers.
The game does offer multiplayer for those who have the time and the patience, but the number of players who are online is rather limited.
I also experienced a number of crashes affecting the title while I was trying to get into multiplayer matches and sometimes when I was trying to launch invasions against countries.
Masters of the World – GeoPolitical Simulator 3 is not a game I would recommend to most players because it’s hard to understand, hard to actually play and can deliver impressive amounts of frustration.
History and politics lovers who have played more than 200 hours of Crusader Kings II, Europa Universalis IV and Democracy 3 might find something to love in the game, as long as they manage to remain patient and understand all its ideas and mechanics.
Masters of the World – GeoPolitical Simulator could impress in the future, as long as the team at Eversim cleans up the interface, makes the core mechanics more approachable and limits its ambition a little bit in order to create a somewhat simpler and easier to play title.
