You Should (Consider) Play(ing)...Crisis in the Kremlin
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- Опубликовано: 22 окт 2024
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Apologies for the abrupt ending. I had to swap out the original song with another one due to a copyright claim. Just play this video ( • National Anthem of USSR ) from about 6:52 onwards to see it in its original glory.
A private corporation "owns the rights" to a "performance" of the "State Anthem of the Soviet Union" by the Red Army Choir. Go figure. Thank you for your understanding, comrades.
![Gunna - HIM ALL ALONG [Official Visualizer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/HiCxoDeo0hc/mqdefault.jpg)
Ugly interface aside, stuff like usa having a country wide mental breakdown because trotskyist soviet union led by gorbachev just landed a man on mars is extremally satisfying
Best mental approach to starting a game in CIK is to expect to fail in your first attempts. The game has many "game over"s that are easy to reach. But this should not deter you. Rather it should encourage you to try again remembering the mistakes you did. They never said managing a superpower was ever easy! Although looking through the very well-done steam guides to managing in this game helps a lot.
You should check out the new game these developers made not long ago called Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall. The spawn of the game is more condensed to a few years but you can now play as most eastern block countries all with their unique events. I would say the economy part of that game got dumbed down though so I prefer CIK as a much more indepth experience.
Oh, yeah. That's totally how I figured the game would go. It's the same mental approach that I have when I pick up a new grand strategy game or something and I'm trying to figure out how the systems all work together.
And I actually found Ostalgie when I was doing some research for the script for this video. It looks like its certainly a step up production-wise, but the sense I got from reading into it was that CiK was better overall for its narrower scope and greater depth - like you said. Either way, I might do a follow-up with Ostalgie sometime in the future.
Thanks for watching! I appreciate it!
I bough Crisis in the Kremlin almost a year ago. I am glad to say that I completely agree with you.
I am myself a fan of strategy and historical games. I have played CK2, HOI4, CIV5, etc. Since I discovered the genre ten years ago with Civilization Revolution it has become my favourite type of game. So, one year ago, when I discovered in a Steam sale a game about a period I wasn't very informed of, I bought it without thinking too much or investigating about the game.
The first time I opened it, I was horrified. I am not exacly someone who cares too much about graphics. Papers, Please is one of my favourite games after all, and I always think that you shouldn't judge a book for its covers. But this was too much. Some games use original art styles to compensate for the lack of graphics, but in this case you feel like you are playing a game that someone made in their own basement 20 years ago. But, well, I took courage and began playing. Overall, the game is "interesting". What I mean with it is that some ideas are great, some are not bad, and some are awfull. The game gives a lot of information about the last years of the Soviet Union, if you are interested in that period. It also gives you a lot of space to work with: You can be whatever you want, really. From a Trotskyist who is making ultra-sonic bombs to destroy the USA, to a Stalinist who is developing a machine-based economy, to a Liberal who is supporting ultra-right-wing terrorism in the USA. Now, its a game that despite all of that is hard to get into it, for the following reasons:
The interface is bizantine. 95% of the time you don't know what is going on, what effects does each action have and how you are gonna deal with it in the future. The only way to learn is to, basically, play the game with some paper and a pen. Each time you make something, write it down, and then next turn write the consequences of that action. Of course, with many things happening at the same time, you need to be patient to understand what each thing does. It takes a lot of patience. I already played Cultist Simulator, that actually does the same thing: the fun part of the game is understanding everything by yourself, without the game telling you what you have to do. Now, the difference between this two games is that Cultist Simulator was a choice in development. Crisis in th Kremlin is just the result of someone who doesn't have any experience. You can see it because there is a tutorial and, as you point it out in the video: The developers even gave you an actual strategy to how you can defeat the USA. What is the point of telling the player how to win the game? Is like if you were playing a puzzle game that tells you that you need to jump to complete the puzzle, and all the difficulty is that you have to learn what key you need to press in order to jump.
Someone could say that this is done to represent how a politician feels. Like, you make decisions and most times you don't know what is gonna happen. I disagree. One of the worse things about the Interface happens when there are protests and/or Yeltsin asks for reforms and you say "Yes". The game doesn't tell you what was changed. Yes, you hear me right. Apparently you were so busy working that you signed the papers for the reforms without actually reading what were they. In one of my plays, I was a Reformer and wanted to make some reforms in the economy, to make it more controlled by the workers' unions, and I also wanted to try a direct democracy. Yeltin came in an event and asked that more reforms were needed. I though, by how the event was written, that saying "Yes" would only mean that I gave support to Yeltsin. The right would be glad, the left would be pissed, bla bla bla. As reformers are part of the right-wing, I said "Why not", and gave Yeltsin my support. Three turns latter, the mayor of Leningrad made his city a special economical zone. This event only happens if you are a mixed capitalist-soclalist economy. Then I checked and, yes, apparently saying "Yes" to Yeltsin makes that your country suddedly becomes a mixed economy and a Western democracy. And I didn't had enough political power to reverse it. So, when you have to give to the pressure of the protesters, just remember to check all the interface just because the game cannot tell you: "Well, this has happened". And this, in my opinion, doesn't make the game more complex or difficult, just more tedious.
The difficulty setting of the game is irrelevant, for what I know. If you lower the difficulty, you have more money and some indicators (like industry etc.) are better, and if you rise it, you have less money and you have to cut some things and the indicators are lower. But it doesn't matter, because most of the time you don't lose because you don't have resources, but because you don't know what is going on. In my first play, in Easy difficulty, I put all the money in the industry. But, because I didn't put enough in fighting corruption, in the state etc. the corruption just kept growing and growing and the economy was slowing down. This is a bad decision by the developers: they know that the hard part of the game is about knowing how the mechanics work, not how much money you have, but how you deal with it, and too much money sometimes is worse in this kind of game. The only setting that actually changes how the game progresses is one that takes the events of 1990-1991 and puts them in 1985, when you are beggining the game. The rest, in my opinion, are pointless.
The game is text-based, most of the time, so you would think that the developers took the time to check the English translation to see that everything is understood, right? Well, no. There are huge mistranslations, and writing mistakes (Well, I also have some big mispelling mistakes, not an English native speaker, so please don't think I am some kind of cunning linguist). Of course, most of the times you understand what the text means but it gets anoying, specially as text is almost all that you have, and is the main source for your decisions. Some events can also be more clear about what you are being asked.
One of the things I liked about Crisis in the Kremlin is that it combines internal and external politics, something that most games don't do. Almost all games based in the Cold War era follow the same recipe: You play as either the USA or the USSR (with another player or the IA playing as the other), and you win countries to your side, slowly destroying your enemy. Other games based in politics, like Democracy 3, only let you play as if your country is an island with nothing around it. Only some indicators, like Turism or Exports, let you know that there is a world out there, but other than that you don't "feel" that you are playing as the president of a country. You can play as Canada, make it a socialist utophia and, apparently, the USA don't have a single problem with it. In this game, this is great, but it could have been done better. In one of my most "sucesfull" plays, I was in 1990. The Soviet Union was doing great. I brought some reforms, the conomy was doing fine, China and Iran joined the Comintern, almost all African countries and some South American ones were under my influence: everything was "fine". Then an event came in which one Baltic country (I don't remember witch one, but either Latvia or Lithuania) asked for language rights. I said "Okay, I don't see anything wrong in this". Wrong. Then nationalist began to appear all around the Socialist Republics. Then Belarus asked about some Soviet war crime. I only knew about Katyn (and that was with Poland), so I said to myself "Let's say the truth, that would calm them down". Well, they didn't calm down. I started to bribe the presidents, but it was getting nowhere because my influence was droping each turn. So the USSR started to collapse without its allies and esphere intact. So basically, by 1992 about a third of the globe was communist, but the Soviet Union collaped anyway without a single effect in its allies. That could have been more realistic.
The best part of the game is the soundtrack. The main soundtrack, made out of communist songs (most of them of the GDR and the USSR, but also a couple from the PRC) is just great. I also love the songs from Mama Russia, but there are too few songs and in 10 minutes you would have listened all of them. A shame that most of the songs from Mama Russia are nowhere to be found in the Internet (I only found 4 of them, if someone knows where to get them please let me know).
My conclusion? If the game was released again by the developers with a more clear and beautifull interface and with a full correction of the English version of the text, I would pay to buy it again. I only spend about 4€ for what I remember (It was a sale, with the Ukrayne DLC included), but I will be willing to pay another 10. In its current state? Well, the game is on Steam for 5€, so I think is worth a try. I mean, it has more replayable value and realism than Democracy 3 (and it costs 23€!). Right now, I am investigating about the new games the same developers have made about the rest of the Warsaw Pact and China in the 80 after the death of Mao. Let's see if they learned from their mistakes.
I tried playing Legacy of Mao and it seems to be even more arcane that Kremlin. It's going to take a lot more work to try and decipher that game's systems.
And I completely agree with you on the interface especially. If they redid it, I think it would be a lot more popular.
Thanks for the extremely thorough and insightful comment! I'm glad you got something out of my video. :)
@@CultoftheCyberSkull A shame! The developers are really good: they investigate about the subject and give a detailed aproach on the time and place; they know how to make a plausible narrative in the field of alternative-history (in a genre that most of the times is stuck with simple eye-catching stories that most of the times either don't make any sense or they don't even try); and they also know how to make a complex strategy game. The only thing they lack is how to make an Interface. Something so simple yet it completely reduces the possibilities. A game that should be in a 8 ends up in a 6 (1 to 10). When they said they were releasing new games, I though they learned from that mistake, but apparently not.
By the way, thanks for replying. I honestly didn't await an answer. I watched Indigo Gaming video about Cyberpunk and checked your channel. Then I saw a video about Crisis in the Kremlin. And, because it is one of my bigest frustations (I spent about 20 hours playing the game, yet I don't completely understand how the economy works, 90% of my plays end up in 1 or 2 years, and only 2 times I went all the way to 1991. Looking at the achievements, it seems the game can be played to a couple of years ago, as Trump is mencioned, but I cannot confirm this because the time I lasted longer I ended in 1992), I just though about putting my personal opinion. By the way, I see that you review many strategy and RPG games, and these are my favourite genres, so I suscribed and I am gonna stick around. I like that you mention games that are mostly unknown to the general public, bringing information and commentary to a part of the industry that is ignored by almost everyone.
Oh, and for this and future comments, sorry for my constant gramatical and writing errors in English. Not my native language.
@@alberum8442 No worries. You write pretty well. And thank you again! I hope you continue to enjoy the videos I put out. RPG and strategy games are my favourites, too. :)
i aint readin all that
A private corporation owns the rights to a performance of a communist song. Janey mack.
Its a great game however i think the DLC should be more extensive. the chernobyl DLC dosent go that much into depth
Особо ничего не понял, но очень интересно =)
Your playing stuff like this but not bannersaga 😅.. :) ...I kid.
I really enjoy weird and somewhat obscure games. That's what inspired the whole series to begin with!
@@CultoftheCyberSkull yeah I get ya....I do to sometimes, you got a new sub 😉
@@CultoftheCyberSkull I wonder if I'm your first Australian sub (since I'm assuming your American 😄)
Canadian. And you very well could be! I'm not sure, to be honest.
I think I should side with the Moderates. Why? Because, this is not Lenin wants. What Lenin wants was to proceed the New Economic Policy. This policy was abandoned in 1928 claiming it was uncommunistic. Uncommunistic what? Central-planned Economy doomed the USSR.
My current play through was it is by hard line neo conservatives and stalinists while lying is a lying false friendship with the West And via research and a lot of the complicated in game controls that I don't feel like talking about I managed to establish a swash astronautistic technocracy not on a kin to the ultra visionary socialists from TNO, By basically abandoning the interest of nonstop revolutions abroad I was able to conserve enough money in order to make sure the turbulent times through 85 to 9191 went relatively smoothly with only a couple of lay a couple of independence protests in the balkans which I easily shut down by sending armored vehicles To crush the protesters, An important thing to note as well as you need to finish the Afghanistan war quickly and you can do this by encouraging the Indians to go to war with Pakistan overcashmere maintaining a high enough military presence and arming the Indians as well as continually sending guns but not manpower to the Afghanistan Columbia's party I mean this party assist the Indians in overthrowing Pakistan and start clearing out mujadine dens in Pakistan before beginning the intervention later In Afghanistan proper guaranteeing you the Middle Eastern state will be under your dominion it's Is it visible to to work with Iran and stat help establish a moderate left wing Islamic coalition as well as join with the US in sanctioning the South African apartheid regime before giving your full support to the communists and you will have a very loyal and borderline unassailable ally in the african continent, In my play through the tianmen square protests works causing the Chinese Communist party to rapidly it's party corruptedly lose control causing the nation to fracture in a Civil War with me supporting poxy Communist loyalists by continuing to strengthen myself economically I was able to put myself in a position where I didn't even need fund insurrections in Africa the people were beginning to voluntarily splis terribly flipped and/or their regimes were changing in favor of mine simply due to the economic benefits By dropping out of the space race and going for peaceful coexistence I was able to siphon off US technologies with US technologies without committing to overtly hostile gestures I was able to begin the automated 5 year plan by focusing heavily on technology and automation, America eventually started breaking down and and after some humiliating defeats involving me standing my ground in Panama and invading Yugoslavia on behalf of the Serbians in the break up rebuilding Yugoslavia as a pro Communist power and flipping Albania back Into the Warsaw packed in the process, America wound up electing Donald Trump who ran for office almost 3 decades early in 1990 causing the US to begin withdrawing from nato from International affairs giving me a free hand to finally begin expanding after holding back on trying to go tit for tat with the US in favor of internal economic stability by 1995 I've the world is mostly within my Sphere and and we've built the palace of all Soviets were at least begun construction of it
huh? Lenin specified it was a temporary measure and not a policy that could run a socialist state, and he was quite intensive in underlying the capitalist economics of the nep never ever calling them socialists... what came after the Nep was the best attempt of Stalin to construct a socialist economy as described by Lenin's lasts wroks (alongside marx and engel's works) within the restrictments of the tecnology, communication range, industrialization etc. that where present at the time. What really doomed the ussr was the incapacity to develop, better, more efficent and less beurocratic ways of socialist development, regardless of the tecnological innovations, and a shift of party line from class struggle to life and economic improvements. Especially thanks to the Brezhnevite strict planning policies that tried (and failed) to improve the civilian industry and scale down the heavy industry so that the avarage citizen could enjoy a life similair to the united states. The failure of this program facilitated liberal talking points of privatization and a return to the nep, eventually leading to the disastrous pereistroika we all know and hate today.
Tldr: it wasn't necessarily the beurocraticization that led the dissolution of the ussr but it was, on the other hand, the strictness of party policymakers and planners and a lack of ideological coherence that led to a rehabilitation of liberalist thought and economics leading to Perestroika and Yeltsin.