Make America Great Again : The Trump Presidency | Review - my long overdue eating crow

This is why I don't make silly bets with the internet anymore. In 2016 after having a few drinks I made a silly bet with the internet coming up to the 2016 election. If Donald Trump won the US election against all odd I'd cover one of the Trump related video games. At the time I thought I'd record a lets play or something, but as things sometimes go I didn't get round to it and as I never really did get into doing lets plays I've instead decided to cover the game here as a review. This is my punishment for a silly bet I made and let it be a warning to all of you not to make such silly bets. So before this term is over and either a second term begins or his presidency ends entirely I thought I should probably actually eat crow for making such a silly bet with the internet. Enjoy the review.

Title Name: Make America Great Again : The Trump Presidency

Price: £1.99 / $2.99 but 50% off as of publishing this review and until the 9th of November on Steam

Review:

So oddly enough this is basically an updated version of a game I played a bit of a long time ago called President John America saves America. I remember liking in back then but I do remember fellow XBLIG games critic Indie Gamer Chick really not enjoying it as much. At the time I enjoyed the over the top silliness of the game (at least what I played of it) making it feel like an over the top parody. Make America Great Again : The Trump Presidency is some of the parts of that game changed to include Donald Trump and other real life politicians and I feel like a lot of the parody element has been lost over the years as reality itself keeps turning previous parodies into reality.

Make America Great Again : The Trump Presidency opens with sections taken from a Trump rally and a probably copyright infringing recording from said rally of a performance of the American National Anthem. Gone is the silly over the top singing that was in President John America Saves America and it feels like a lot of other elements are gone too or changed to no longer be the exaggerations they were, instead replaced with what is actual Trump iconography. A game about Donald Trump single-handedly: saving the American economy; eliminating the US debt and defeating ISIS should feel far more like some kind of absurdist parody, the problem is it doesn't. The problem is this feels like it could entirely be a sincere game made by some of the more zealous supporters of Trump, not just some meme-lords online having a bit of fun but the work of a person who really does believe all this. This problem isn't helped by the game itself offering special thank to The Donald  subreddit at the start of the game.

I don't know if the fact it's hard to tell means it's more biting satire of the world as is or an indictment of how bad things have got. Don't get me wrong here I'm not saying Trump's opposition are much better either as you could easily make this game the other way round with Trump as some evil supervillain you have to stop and it would be equally worryingly close to actual views people seem to hold.

Now if you're suspecting I've been trying to put off talking about gameplay you'd be right here because even that feels lackluster here. Most of the gameplay is actually a sort of commodities trading simulation where to reduce the USAs debt you have to buy commodities from countries selling low and sell to countries buying high. You're somewhat on the clock as your national debt will build as the interest piles on top of the debt so you have to make deals that will be profitable quickly. Every so often one of the three commodities (Food, Product and Oil) will either see a surge in demand or a drop in market demand which will of course impact the price and it's up to you have to react in these cases and if you can capitalise on the market. You can also upgrade the USAs national production to generate essentially free product over time to sell. One of the main issues though is with each countries buy prices and sell prices changing basically daily and the only way to see them being to click on the country and open a separate menu it really does quickly become a pain in the arse to play and would really have benefitted with merely hovering over a country bringing up a small menu with the buy and sell information on it to streamline the game. This is made especially annoying as to actually buy and sell items you have to open another menu and select buy or sell and the specific product you want however as opening and viewing the countries buy and sell prices screen and selecting to buy or sell both require clicking the mouse you can sometimes fail to click on buy or sell. Instead you end up just opening the buy and sell price information screen instead as the buy / sell selection screen doesn't lock out the ability to open the information screen.

The country information screen showing the prices they'll sell to you for and buy from you at

The buy / sell menu in game the crosshair is the mouse cursor you have to move over the option you want

Additionally on a countries information screen you get told the population and the countries standing in the world which relate to the maximum trade deal size you can make and the potential world anger at you for hostile actions against said countries. Also all the other countries in the world have an unlockable upgrade in them that will help make things easier in the game along with telling you the requirements to unlock said upgrade. 

When buying and selling Trump can threaten countries to get their buy prices lower or can schmooze with the leaders to get them to buy for a higher price (both of these options are on a cooldown and rely on playing a simple timing based minigame). Both schmoozing and threatening are on a cooldown and their effectiveness can also seem to depend upon a countries relationship with America. Countries that fear America will be more susceptible to threats while those that like America will be more susceptible to being schmoozed. How do you get a country to like you? Well you have to send them commodities in aid when asked for while getting a country to fear America requires you to launch missile attacks on the country or invade it. Invading a country and doing missile attacks or pumping more oil or printing more money all push up the global anger at the USA and push the world towards world war 3 while sending aid to countries asking for it reduces this anger, you can also increase the effectiveness of missile strikes and invasions by paying to upgrade the USA's military capabilities. 

Images showing the threaten mini-game where you have to try to stop the skull in the middle of the bar

The upgrade unlock requirements are actually one of the few parts of the game I can actually praise as they are varied enough to push you to try and do a variety of different things sometimes potentially outside of what you'd normally plan to do to get the unlock. As an example some unlocks require you to invade the country without starting World War 3 and losing the game; while others just require you buying specific items from the country. The unlocks themselves can do things like helping you move round the world map quicker, make schmoozing and threatening easier, give you discounts when buying things or upgrade Trumps helicopter combat abilities for when fighting ISIS. This leads nicely into the second aspect of the game the side scrolling style fights with ISIS terrorists.

These sections start off fairly monotonous with you shooting fighters on the ground and trucks with mounted machine guns while catching Trump Steak crates that drop and I presume provide some health; all the while trying to dodge the RPG fire trying to take you down. As you progress to later fights vs ISIS they turn into almost bullet hell shooters but not very fun ones as the truck mounted machine gun fire is hard to dodge and while it does little damage it will chip away at your health. The later levels basically require you to be getting the upgraded weapons and manoeuvrability for the helicopter to stand a chance. Later still level bring in annoying helicopter enemies who are hard to deal with initially due to unresponsive aiming controls in this game play mode, moving where Trump is aiming his gun is so slow I actually had to turn up my mouse sensitivity (using button on the mouse itself because the game doesn't have its own options menu). Later on you do get a sword which is seemingly more effective at dealing with helicopters but it is annoying when Trump's hand gun is the only way to handle them beforehand as even the helicopters mini-gun only fires at an angle toward the ground. Eventually you reach the head of ISIS and have a boss fight with him in his Tank that fires missiles and giant turbans at you.

ISIS tank boss fight 

I already mention the lack of an options menu and this become annoying as it means you can't easily turn down the games audio, worse still as you play for longer periods you'll find the same Trump lines and quotes being repeated and becoming grating with no way to turn the audio down on these. The game also has no rebindable control options and while I found my Xbox controller did work for the game (which would make sense as it's basically an edited version of an old XBLIG game) the game doesn't actually show the controls for a controller, only the keyboard and mouse controls so it would require trial and error to learn how to play with said controller. Oh and there's no mouse control in the menus to select options you have to use W and S to select options. I will say the game does have one option that it shows and that's the option to change between fullscreen and windowed which is also on the esc menu in game too.

Verdict

A game that really is mediocre at best and generally feels low effort and rushed to PC most of the time while also losing any silly charm its original XBLIG incarnation had. Somehow the game feels just worse now and the tedium of the gameplay would likely be enough to turn moderate Trump supporters into Trump haters just because his name was attached to this mediocrity, even if supposedly that would be in line with the quality of some of Trumps own officially branded products. I beat the game in just over 4 hours and in that time I did experience 1 crash on start up for the game.

The game's problems and fairly tedious gameplay really do hold this one back and feel like this was a cash grab the problem being if it is meant as parody, reality itself is sometimes proving to be more extreme. It's worst sin though is, if this is a meme game (and the presence of PEPE would suggest it is) then it fails to even truly understand the internet culture and memes it is referencing as when beating the game you get a rating based on how quickly you finished it. I got the lowest ranting the game has.

a

The problem is as everyone into internet memes knows Jeb is inevitable and unstoppable. 

In the end this game feels like a mediocre cash grab despite much of the art being changed when the games biggest issues such as gameplay and user experience etc were entirely ignored and not improved upon. Oh and one more issue I didn't mention before now. while the game claims to save progress it apparently only saves some of it with love for the USA seemingly being far different in each country to when you saved the game and quit previously with in some cases countries that loved me having 0 love and after loading a save other times countries that had no love for the USA having nearly full love.

Composite Score:

Overall score:

Can you believe I got through this whole review without mentioning how in the UK Trump is a slang term for fart?

Is this what people meant when they said they really wanted more politics in video games?