Make America Great Again: The Trump Presidency

I have spent serious time with grand-strategy titles that model entire economies across centuries, so when I sat down with this 2016 indie parody I knew exactly what I was looking at: a novelty item dressed up in simulation clothing. That is not necessarily a dismissal. Knowing what you are buying matters more than the label on the box. The core loop splits into two distinct modes. On the world-map layer, you pilot Trump's helicopter between nations, buying and selling oil, food, and supplies to chip away at the national debt. Prices shift based on each country's fear and approval rating toward the US, and you can tilt those ratings by invading nations, running humanitarian aid packages, or drilling in Alaska for extra supply. It sounds like the skeleton of a decent trade sim, and in the first thirty minutes it kind of is. The problem is that the decision space never deepens. You find the profitable commodity, run the same route, and repeat. There is no tech tree, no diplomatic complexity, no fog-of-war. The only meaningful check on aggression is the World War 3 trigger, which ends your run instantly if you antagonize too many powers at once. Compared to any actual strategy title, the depth ceiling is very low. The second mode, handling the ISIS objective, drops you into a side-scrolling arcade brawler where you fly Trump's chopper and shoot down enemy units. Gear unlocks - machine guns, turbo boosters - give it a thin progression hook, but the action is repetitive enough that community reviewers noted it stops being amusing after roughly the second engagement. The Trump voice clips and the meme-era aesthetic land their jokes exactly once. After that the audio becomes noise you will mute. Average play sessions tracked by community data sit under two and a half hours, which is honest: this is a single-run experience, maybe two if you are chasing the achievement list. For a strategy player expecting even a light simulation of presidential decision-making, the disappointment is real. There is no budget management beyond debt reduction, no Congress to wrangle, no domestic policy whatsoever. The "political sim" tag the community applied is aspirational. What you actually get is closer to a budget flash game with a Steam wrapper. The saving grace is that it never pretended otherwise, and the price has always reflected that. If your goal is a meme artifact from the 2016 election cycle, it delivers. If your goal is a game that rewards thinking two moves ahead, look elsewhere.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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