Fate of the World: Tipping Point – Review
Fate of the World: Tipping Point? Ooh yeah, gonna get my assault rifle, battle armour, some grenades and imma save this world. YOLO! Wait, what? It’s not a 3D shooter? Not even an RTS? It’s a strategy card game ‘that simulates the real social and environmental impact of global climate change over the next 200 years’? Sounds, uhm… great… I guess.
Story
Okay, so you won’t get to blow up stuff to save the world this time. You are the supreme leader of the Global Environment Organisation aka the GEO. It’s a society tasked with the protection of our planet and for some reason it has a reasonable amount of political control over every country in the world. In other words, since you are the supreme leader, the choices you make will decide what happens to our planet. That’s it.
If you want a background story for your own character you’ll have to make it yourself. That’s what i did anyway: My character is an orphan midget, named Francesco Rembrandt, who lost his parents and pet alligator in a tsunami caused by global warming. After that dreadful event he swore to devote his entire life to save the environment and to try to increase the quality of life for every living creature on earth. How he got to be the leader of the GEO? No one knows. Some suspect he has psychic powers.
Graphics
Since it’s a text based / card game you can’t expect stunning graphics but overall, it’s a bit messy, clunky and way too colorful. I have the impression that the designers wanted to see how many colors they could use in one game at the same time (the answer is ‘a lot’). Besides the overabundance of colors, the lay-out itself is fairly messy. There’s a button you can press in every corner of the screen and much of the buttons seem to be placed randomly. Another thing I did not like were the ‘nametags’ of the regions. They look like they’ve been designed by your crazy uncle who just discovered photoshop.
Sound
There aren’t much sounds, just the basic card-flipping and button-clicking sounds. The background music isn’t bad but not really memorable. My game version came with a soundtrack CD. Most of the tracks are 30 seconds to 1 minute long and often sound like variations of the same few tunes.
Gameplay
You have to complete missions. Each mission spans over several decades or even centuries. A mission could be something like “reach the year 2080 with each region having a Human Development Index of at least 0,7, global oil production must be more than 35000 Twh and your organisation can’t be banned from more than 8 regions”.
The world is divided in twelve regions: Europe, China, North Africa, etc… For each region you can recruit up to six agents and every agent can have a card. Both agents and cards cost money and, as always, that’s something you never have enough of.
During your mission you’ll have to deal with problems like drought, civil disorder and health issues. To solve these problems and to reach your goals you have to use the cards. Each card comes with an explanation and does ‘something’ but it’s never completely clear what it does. To help you choose your cards there are also data charts but just like the cards, they aren’t very clear.
Every recruit can use one card and each region can have up to six recruits. When you’ve spent all your money or when all the recruits have a card, you can continue and the game fast forwards 5 years. After those 5 years you see what effect your cards have had and what has happened in the meantime through news bulletins.
This cycle repeats itself till you have reached the final year or when you fail. And fail you will. Despite the available easy mode, the game is still relatively hard because of its unpredictability. Even when my mission went well, I never really knew exactly what I did to succeed. All the time I didn’t feel like I was playing a game but more like someone was showing me what could go wrong with the world and what little I could do to prevent it.
This is the main problem with FotW; It never feels like a actual videogame. It’s a bit too scientific and unpredictable. It’s not bad per se but i think you’ll only find it entertaining if you have a serious interest in global politics and are willing to do a lot of research to see what each card does and how to interpret all the available data.
Conclusion
Despite the relative simple gameplay, FOTW isn’t an easy game. The problem is that it’s just not clear what the cards exactly do. It also feels like it’s designed by scientists who want to educate more than they want to entertain while perhaps it should have been the other way around. I prefer a documentary or an interesting article over a ‘strictly’ educational videogame. If you are interested in global politics this game is without a doubt for you, casual gamers probably won’t like it as much
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