Fate of the World

The fate of the world puts you in the position as the boss of the GEO (Global Enviromental Organization), and it's up to you to use the agents you have at your disposal to save the future for mankind. The game is turn-based and starts in 2015, with each turn taking you a further 5 years into the future. To prevent armageddon you will have to recruit agents all over the world, and then task them to do various things with a card-like system. Each of the missions  have different goals, some just require that you reach certain points in the future without GEO being kicked out from too many regions, while other missions will also require you to reach these points without destroying and polluting the earth too much. 
 

In some ways, Fate of the World (FotW) feels like a card game/board game. You recruit new agents, with icons that look like stereotypical board game pieces, each of these pieces provides a slot for a card which you can then purchase for between 5 and 100 dollars. When you start to realise whats going on under the hood however, it's apparent that this game never could have been made in a non-digital form. There's loads of statistics, diagrams and spread-sheet looking images for you to stare at for ages. The presentation of these stats aren't always superb, with some screens leaving a lot of empty room which could have been filled with important information, and sometimes you have to dig deep in the menus to find the intel you are looking for.

FotW has had a rough start, and the tutorials and difficulty settings weren't optimal from the get-go. The dev team has been hard at work to fix the launch problems, and the game now features a less steep learning curve and a few more missions. That being said, it can still be a bit hard to know what you are supposed to do to avoid a global financial crisis, short fuel supplies and still keep the emissions low, and the game fails somewhat to guide. 
 
 
Though each mission has different objectives, they play mostly the same, and after you have completed (or at least tried) a few of the missions, the game will start to become repetetive. You will have to micromanage a lot of the same cards around in all of the regions, and it is tiresome to keep track of the stats in all of them. The soundtrack suffers from the same problem as the gameplay; it feels good at first, but after playing for a while it will get pretty repetetive. Turning down the sound and listening to your own music won't hurt though, since the sound in the game is only used for athmospheric purposes. 
 
Ultimately, Fate of the World is a game with an interesting premise that a lot of people will enjoy for a while, but only the most hardcore will play through. The game looks good and can create some really interesting stories (like how Earth was destroyed in a thermonuclear war started by Latin America after a global financial crisis), and for its cost is a worthy purchase for those interested in the climate change. It is not however a game for everyone, so if you dont care or have no idea about even the basics of climate change, you should probably sit this one out.