![]() Money, influence, and military support are just numbers on the screen, highly abstract and without intrinsic meaning. That means you must recruit people of a certain country to infiltrate it, but since you only control 6 people at any given time, you are forced to constantly demote people to replace them with recruits in order to efficiently infiltrate new nations, which causes loss of loyalty (Something the game actually never explains how to increase).īesides that, the actual gameplay feels like it was made by an engineer. That is extremely important both for immersion and balance – the game constantly throws number modifiers to actions, with things like foreign citizenship making it harder to infiltrate institutions or perform errands. ![]() ![]() It also doesn’t help that funding lodges is mainly a number’s game and that the Brotherhood’s hierarchy is universal – instead of founding an initial master lodge followed by grand lodges in each country, each with their own unique members busy infiltrating each nation’s culture and furthering the order’s goals, you get a meaningless dozen people shared across the world, and three-quarters of them are useless – the game actually has you micromanaging 6 units instead of overseeing a big secret society. In fact, after more than 15 hours with the game, I’m still not sure what’s the purpose of recruits besides replacing masters, as I can find no way to interact with any of the dozen of initiates I recruited over time. While you can recruit a dozen neophytes and acolytes, you only actually control the 6 masters. While the game’s angle, complexity, and breadth of errands are all very interesting, the actual gameplay loop of Secret Government is exceedingly boring. This grand lodge generates daily resources without need to do errands and without raising the country’s awareness of the Brotherhood, as well as making any undertakings in that region easier and cheaper. Each of the three institutions have three levels of infiltration for a total of nine, and once 3 infiltrations have occured in a single nation, a grand lodge can be established there. In order to do those things, you need to manage each Brother’s secrecy and the country’s awareness of the order, as well as use up resources acquired by infiltrating a country’s institutions. By building lodges and infiltrating the governmental, economic, and military institutions of various countries throughout Europe, you get to slowly direct the course of humanity’s affairs. While a grand strategy, Secret Government is not really a 4X – instead of building units and facilities and guiding the course of a country/empire/civilization, you recruit members for a secret Illuminati-like society in order to influence the world from the shadows. Therefore, grand strategy titles need a unique angle rather than a year to stand apart from the crowd, and that’s exactly what Secret Government goes for: instead of controlling countries and empires, this game is all about controlling secret societies. Aside from the sheer scale and variables at play, there’s not that many time periods one can set them in Ancient Times, Medieval Times, Renaissance, Age of Sailing, World Wars, sci-fi – aside from the modern contemporary world, it’s all been done and dusted several times over.
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