This Is the President

My spreadsheet instincts told me to catalogue every cabinet member's stress threshold before finishing the first in-game month, and that impulse is precisely what This Is the President rewards, up to a point. The core loop is built around a four-year term with a single, mercenary objective: ratify Amendment 28, granting lifetime immunity to any former president, before your criminal past as a shady multi-millionaire businessman catches up with you. It is a heist movie wearing an Oval Office suit, and for the first few hours that framing is genuinely funny and sometimes tense. The resource management layer is the game's sharpest tool. You start with a small cabinet, a lawyer, a bodyguard, a hacker, and a communications director, and each one carries a stress meter. Assign them too aggressively across monthly tasks and they burn out, quit, or worse. The year-by-year escalation of objectives adds genuine pressure: year one demands raising millions to buy congressional votes, year two has you working to reshape the Supreme Court, and each stage asks you to juggle approval ratings, cash flow, and staff welfare simultaneously. For anyone who has ever min-maxed a Paradox campaign, the early rhythm of prioritising which crisis to tackle and which to let slide for rating-point reasons will feel familiar and satisfying. Where the game loses ground is in the depth, or rather the absence of it, beneath that surface. Many dialogue choices result in outcomes that feel arbitrary rather than consequential, with approval scores shifting in ways that resist logical prediction. The game does include a month-rewind mechanic, but using it reduces the whole thing to rote memorisation rather than genuine strategic reasoning. Filler events pile up as the term progresses, and several critics noted the same creeping sense that the game is stretching a tighter six-hour experience across ten hours of runtime. The satire, while pointed in its setup, rarely moves beyond the obvious joke that politicians are corrupt, which lands flat if you arrived expecting the moral weight of something like Suzerain. The presentation is a genuine bright spot. Hand-drawn 2D artwork, a jazzy soundtrack that makes bribery feel breezy, and occasional absurdist set-pieces, including a full Broadway musical mid-campaign, give the whole thing a personality that purely mechanical criticism undersells. The writing hits harder when it lurches into the surreal: gaslighting a foreign leader about reptilian conspiracies, or dispatching your hacker-drone team to neutralise a rogue astronaut before a Mars mission goes public. Those moments justify the price of admission on their own terms. The tone sits closer to House of Cards crossed with Tropico than anything resembling a West Wing earnestness, and anyone arriving with the latter expectation will bounce off it quickly. For strategy-genre veterans, be honest with yourself about what this is. There is no tech tree, no AI opponent worth studying, no mod ecosystem to extend longevity. The decision-making is closer to interactive fiction with resource guardrails than it is to a management sim. Players who have exhausted This Is the Police or who want a lighter political narrative between heavier sessions will find it a reasonable ten-hour diversion. Hardcore sim players who want modelled consequences and deep systemic play should look elsewhere. The Metacritic score of 62 is a fair centre point: the ceiling is higher when the writing clicks, the floor is lower when the padding sets in.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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