Review by: Rob Zacny

Victoria II is a beautiful model of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Inside its detailed and accelerated miniature world, you can see our own present coming into outline as wars rage, populations shift, and governments fall. A world of farmers, artisans, and aristocrats yields to one of factory workers, clerks, and capitalists. Kings and parliaments battle over the political destinies of their countries, creating a landscape of resentment, repression, and sudden liberalization.

Peer closer at that landscape and the amount of detail is overwhelming. You can see the moment when a group of New England factory workers finally get fed up with capitalist exploitation, or when the dream of a free Poland re-ignites in the hearts of thousands of Germany's Polish subjects. Factories explode in size and productivity as new demand and greater industrial capacity collide. Farmers stream from the land into the cities to power the new economy.

You can get vertigo looking into this game, at the way it telescopes from the broadest sweep of history to the most minute detail. I stand in awe of its intricacy and complexity. But what I have trouble seeing, in the midst of this precise clockwork world, is the need for a player.

There are certainly many buttons to push and decisions to make in Victoria II. Playing as the US in the years leading up to the Civil War, I was repeatedly prompted to choose between alienating slaveowners and infuriating abolitionists. What is rarely clear is the difference these decisions make.

A typical decision event, for instance, will warn you that one choice will cause "All Pops [population members, think Sims] in Vicksburg to gain 1.0 consciousness", which is apparently not good news for the Republic. The other option will cause "Lower Class Pops" to gain 0.10 militancy. You will see this event dozens of times because the same events happen over and over in different regions. So a destabilizing abolitionist pamphlet will turn up in Washington, in Richmond, in Vicksburg, and just about everywhere else, posing the exact same dilemma.