The winds of change blow through the Victorian era, when the player in “Victoria 3” is tasked with guiding a nation for a hundred years, until 1936. Behind the game is Swedish Paradox, and the title has been crafted in Stockholm.
Supply and demand and the interests and needs of different social classes are pitted against each other. Add to that the production of dozens of different industries, and diplomacy with the outside world, and you have a complex simulator with a multitude of underlying and interacting systems.
“Incredibly terrifying” at first glance, I think Eurogamers reviewer Rick Lane, however, notes that “Victoria 3” is an excellent teacher with thorough walkthroughs and gives the stamp “recommend”.
He, like the roughly 20 reviewers who Metacritic have collected, are mostly positive and the game scores an average of 83 out of 100.
IGN’s Leana Hafer gives the game an eight out of ten rating. She is annoyed that the wars are boring, and that the AI sometimes behaves irrationally, criticisms that other reviewers also highlight. Even so, it’s the kind of game that “sucks into me and won’t let go, whether I’m trying to turn Hawaii into an anarcho-communist utopia or Afghanistan into the center of the global economy by monopolizing the opium trade”.
PC Gamers Jonathan Bolding scores 84 out of 100 and praises the internal state-building, but describes the international part as the weak link.
Swedish Gamereactors Patrik Severin is even more satisfied and rates it 9 out of 10.
“It is undoubtedly one of the best strategy games of the year,” he writes.