It could’ve worked. It should’ve.
I am, as is well-known, an absolute sicko for any videogame that lets me conjure up some fabulous alternate history. Crusader Kings: what if Novgorod conquered Muscovy? Europa Universalis: what if Ethiopia became the beating, imperial heart of the world economy? Hearts of Iron 4: what if any of WW2’s key players were replaced by someone only loosely aware of what a tank is (I am not good at Hearts of Iron 4)?
But the king of the alt-history genre isn’t Paradox. Not for me, anyway. It’s the ramshackle assortment of socialism sims made by Nostalgames, whose main stock-in-trade is political sims that put you in charge of historical communist states—the USSR, China, the DDR, and so on—at moments of crisis. Of which there were many.
I’ve actually written one of those before—China: Mao’s Legacy, where I attempted to go full Gang of Four on China in the period immediately following Mao Zedong’s death, only to get put on trial for my trouble. I love these games, but I wasn’t kidding about them being ramshackle. They’re creaky, ungainly things. The UI is ugly, the mechanics are badly explained, and the English is lacking. Actually, it’s downright incomprehensible at times.
Which is why I got very excited when I realised there was a new one and it looked a lot slicker than any of Nostalgames’ previous efforts in the genre. Crisis In The Kremlin: The Cold War feels more remake than sequel, which is only appropriate, since 2017’s Crisis In The Kremlin (also by Nostalgames) was itself a remake of an old ’90s Microprose game of the same name. Everything is much the same: pick a leader in 1985, decide a goal, off you go. But now, the UI is a bit nicer and the English is much better.
Anyway, I decided what the Soviet Union of 1985 needed was a hip, Gen Z leader to unite everyone.
