This Is the President Critic Reviews

If you enjoy Choose Your Own Adventure type games, you’ll love This is the President. It scratches a Schadenfreude itch for the dystopian hellscape we currently live in, and it’s equal parts fun, funny, and quite disturbing along the way, even with the odd choice baked in..

The writing is at its best when a situation escalates from relatively believable situations into absurdity and satire. But there are just as many moments when the results of player choices feel forced or when the game is trying too hard to draw from the real world. SuperPAC clearly understands how to make politics into solid game mechanics, they just need to better calibrate the tone of their world.

This is the President is a perfectly patriotic blend of This is the Police, Suzerain, and We. The Revolution, presenting players with scandal after scandal after scandal to wriggle their way out of. Although there are a small handful of choices that corral you into picking the “right” option, the way you cope with the consequences is largely up to you. If you enjoy a novel’s worth of deranged narrative gameplay where choices matter like your life depends on them (and they do), This is the President will command enough mystery, intrigue, and excitement for even the highest of offices.

This is The President won’t deliver much in terms of strategy, but will provide great writing that should pull you through an entire term of virtual presidency.

This Is The President is much like a presidential mandate: it intrigues you in the beginning, then starts to show its real nature as you start worrying about every little mistake, until four years passes by and all you are left with is a bit of indifference and a more or less stable world that still stands firm on its pillars.

A mediocre simulation that only people interested in politics will enjoy.

This is the President is not entertaining in its nature, at least for the vast majority of gamers, but those few who are really into this types of games might actually enjoy being in the shoes of the most powerful man on earth.

This Is The President certainly has its good moments, with its silly humor hitting the mark more often than not and its core plot servings its purpose well. However, it does wear out its welcome thanks to an over-reliance on filler and restrictive mechanics to try and curb the player's success. A little bit more trimming and this could have been a fantastic political game, but even so it still has plenty of quality behind it.

This Is the President grows more tedious with each multiple-choice dialogue sequence, and there many of those here. The tactical aspect is almost nowhere to be found, with your choices barely affecting the game, the narrative/writing is mediocre, and the characters/story forgettable. As for the political satire on offer, it's very, very weak, as it avoids saying anything more thought provoking than "politicians suck!"