Victoria 3 Review: Chaos Grand Strategy in the Steam Age

Everyone, I have some bad news. Victoria 3 not a game where you play a copy of Posh Spice. I was prepared for some sci-fi-tinted Spice Girls pranks, but I was bitterly disappointed. I did have it installed, though, so I decided to test it out and see what kind of game it really is. Turns out Victoria 3 is one strategy gamelike the stable friends in the Crusader Kings Paradox and Hearts of Iron.

Trying to classify Victoria 3 is quite important. Unlike, say, Total War series, Paradox’s grand strategy titles are vastly different from their time period. Iron heart military code WW2 on its sleeve, while Crusader Kings (my personal favorite) Secret is an RPG, just an RPG that happens to make you the ruler of a country, not a random wandering killer. Figure it out, and you’ve captured the game’s allure, especially for those who may not be interested in – or completely abandoned – the historical era it covers.

The answer, to paraphrase my friend Pete, is a Victorian socioeconomic Rube Goldberg machine. You were given control of a country of your choice in early 1836, just a year before everyone’s favorite king named after a Walford tavern placed his protostar on the throne. Great Britain, and you have a century to do whatever you want.

Although Victoria 3 offers some guided game modes with helpful hints on how to achieve a specific goal such as economic domination or an egalitarian society, you mostly let the devices own. Thankfully, the tutorial mode is both powerful and flexible, giving you the option to ask how to achieve the task it presents you with, as well as why you want to do it. You can let the game show you how to click to build and ask to explain why it’s helpful to do and how it will affect your developing country. Also, if you want to work it out on your own, you can do what you like and the tutorial will start over after that. It’s a clever way of allowing players to get into the depths of the game at their own pace.

The various buttons and levers sticking out of your machine will be very familiar to anyone who has ever played a strategy game of this style. You can build various gathering and production buildings, enact laws, and engage in diplomacy with other countries (at the end of the rifle, if it floats your boat). But what makes Victoria 3 so interesting is the behind-the-scenes activity. The population in your country is divided into groups known as populous (sadly, there are no crowds or groups at all). Pops are often defined by occupation, such as cleric, farmer, or scholar. You’re not actually interacting with individual pop-ups, but instead interacting with interest groups they form. Some, such as Samurai, appear only in specific countries, while works like Rural Folk can be found everywhere.

Your job is to keep all these disparate interest groups happy (or at least not so unhappy that they start a revolution) while pushing your country in the direction you choose. For example, move too fast by trying to abolish child labor while industrialists hold all the power, and your attempt to enact new laws will not only fail, you will make them ugly. go in the process. Instead, you must weaken the Industrialists while promoting the Unionists, which can support some of the governments behind them while gently encouraging the urbanization of the lower classes. , until the balance of power is such that you can pass your laws without too much. noisy.

Now that the subject of child labor has been brought up, it’s time to tackle the British Empire-sized elephant in the room. Victoria 3, due to the length of time it covers, deals with a number of nasty issues. Not only that, the nature of the genre also means looking at them in isolation, almost clinically. It is a lot like a numbers game, and has the potential to greatly reduce human suffering to the data points in an economic equation. For these reasons, I must confess that I approached the game with some trepidation.

Victoria 3 navigates these treacherous seas by presenting the Victorian era with brutal honesty that neither glorifies nor flinches from the realities of colonialism.

Thankfully, my suspicions were unfounded. Victoria 3 navigates these treacherous waters by presenting the Victorian era with brutal honesty that neither glorifies nor flinches from the realities of colonialism. It’s a game about progress and the technological and social advances that have shaped the world we live in today. I worried that the absence of historical distance would push me back, but instead it attracted me and I found myself thinking more and more about every action I took, weighing the potential harm compared to benefits.

The spinning act you have to take to keep things from falling apart around you means you have to compromise and change your priorities. You may want to reduce the power of the church and increase health care for your citizens, but the only option available is charity hospitals run by clergy. Public education may be your goal, but if that’s not an option, then surely private school is better than none, right?

It helps that the game isn’t really about winning, it’s about experimenting and learning. The abstract and ambiguous nature of the player’s role in affairs (the monstrous spirit of the nation? A tiny goblin appears in the bedrooms of politicians and screams “Oh, YOU, YOU! WITH THE RIGHT HAND BAR, LOAD UP UNIVERSITY OR DIE!” I have no idea, to be honest) means you can happily ride through revolutions and mode changes, keep poking destroy and motivate the people. Failure can be just as fun as success, as I discovered after leading Belgium through the twentieth century before triggering economic collapse and civil war with the over-expansion of the welfare state. Oi.

Making the medium of entertainment rooted in the recent past is never easy. The interactive nature of the game makes that even more complicated, and the Paradox is no stranger to certain groups who decide that presenting historical reality is equal to endorsement. Victoria 3 succeeds in reimagining a tumultuous chapter in world history with a simple charm that is educational as much as entertaining, encouraging reflection and empathy in the process.