Review – Fate of the World: Tipping Point

Publisher: Red Redemption
Developer: Red Redemption
Platforms: PC, Mac
Genre: Strategy
Players: Single Player
Purchase from: Steam, Official website

The Scoop: If you ever thought that you could solve all of the world’s problems caused by global climate change and make the entire planet one happy place, here is your chance.

The Setup:  Fate of the World: Tipping Point is a strategy game which uses real climate data based on the research of Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University.  This real life data is used to create over 1,000 possibilities/situations/disasters and over 100 real-world policy decisions.  In Fate of the World: Tipping Point, you are seated as the head of a world government known as the GEO.  As the President of the GEO you’re tasked with the burden of dealing with the social and environmental impact of global climate change and make the best, or worst, decisions to try and solve the the problems that arise.  You’ll deal with protestors, resource shortages, welfare issues, animal extinction, and the fun list goes on and on.

The entire game is played by using the mouse, and the GUI is pretty simple with the view of Earth being dead center, with buttons to access different global stats and charts.  From here you can spin the Earth around and select one of the 12 regions, which will then bring you then let you view news and stats for the region, as well as set policies.  Speaking of  policies, you will use a deck of cards to control which policies you have access to and want to play.  Each card has a cost associated with it and some cards will help unlock additional cards.  And cards are spread across different categories such as political, agriculture, technology, energy, and social.  So if you want to declare Martial Law, head on over to the political deck!  Most cards can be completed in one turn (which is 5 years in game time) while other cards may take longer (ex: 50 years to complete).

To play a card you have to recruit an agent for that particular region. Agents cost money to recruit and you are also limited 6 agents per region, and each agent allows you to play 1 card for a particular region.  You’re limited to the amount of funding that you earn each turn, and some global events may cause you to not bring in as much on a particular turn, so you’ll have to be strategic in how you recruit your agents and which cards you need to play.

What cards you “should” play on each turn is pretty much dictated by the news events for each particular region.  If the news feed for South Africa says that people are rioting, you should focus on playing political cards.  Or if the news feed for Latin America says there are issues with poor standards of living, you will want to focus on cards that will help make living in this region more enjoyable.  You get the idea!

When you’re happy with the selection of cards for this turn, you will big purplish button in the bottom right hand corner to play the cards and advance to the next turn, which increases the year by 5.  Each scenario in Fate of the World: Tipping Point has a number of objectives or win conditions that you need to achieve to win the game, so you will continue to play cards until you’ve reached (or failed!) your goal or reached the time limit for a particular scenario.

What’s Hot:   Fate of the World: Tipping Point is a very tricky game, and one of the important things that you have to watch out for is not just the win conditions of the scenario, but also the lose conditions.  More often than not you will find that you’ve reached your win condition, but lost the game due to a particular lose condition.  This really adds to the overall challenge of the game and will keep you on your toes through each scenario.

Speaking of tricky, limiting the amount of cards or policies that can be played per turn to the number of agents a region has really adds to the strategic nature of the game.  You’ll find that you need to balance your funds with the number of agents you have to hire as well as which disasters or situations need to be high priority.  Sometimes a particular region may have a handful of issues that just occurred, yet you only have enough resources to deal with 2 or 3 of the issues.  What do you do? Which comes first? Is it OK to sacrifice the political instability for a turn and hope chaos doesn’t ensue to take care of a critical healthcare issue?  I’ve found myself in this situation multiple times and so will you!

The news feeds and data for each region (and even on the global level) are your vitals.  Keeping an eye on these will help you reach your win conditions as well as keep you from reaching those lose conditions.  You will want to get familiar with the different buttons and know where certain data lives pretty fast.

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