Fate of the World is an interesting simulation of how to deal with global warming, to say the least.
You are given the role as an underfunded leader of a global organisation set up to handle climate change and global warming. To do so, you are given a whole lot of options and a large chain of potential tasks you can tell your lackeys to do.
The first problem then is obvious, you have no idea what these tasks(Displayed as cards) do until you try them, and often only a vague idea of how they'll effect the various things they're supposed to effect. This will be frustrating, and may lead to you just restarting several times just to see what your policies are actually doing, and what they're effecting. Trial and error gameplay will be the first thing you notice, but that is only after you have spend a turn building offices all over, which you need before you can even see what policies and programs you can enact.
There is no real tech tree equivalent you can find that shows you what exactly you can do after building one of such offices, or what leads to what other things.
A real shame is that the game is excellent at hiding your options from you, and that it also hides the data behind a small tab in the top right. You can see practically everything you need to know about an area, but how your politices will effect it, or how these things interact with eachother is left completely behind the scenes. Only a few things you can do actually tell you the full extend of what they're going to be doing with the limited money you're spending on them.
In short, frustration. However, once you get over that and learn roughly what policies go where, you will find the game opens up to you, and lets you actually play it. And it is a much bigger game than it seems to be at first. Sure, it deals with global warming, and your goal is technically to stop it, but to focus purely on that is not going to help you. It's your end goal, while your organisation does not only have the authority, but also the responsibility to prevent wars, establish healthcare and education systems, manage economic growth, and fund technology. And all of these things are not told to you, and neither is it explained to you how to do them, you have essentially become the New World Order and everyone more experienced than you has died or quit. Indeed, one can ask what actual governments do in this game, and I so far haven't seen them bother with anything yet.
When they said it was all up to you to stop climate change, they meant EVERYTHING. Make the middle east a stable place, prevent the global economy from crashing, fund space missions, create anti-flooding and drought systems, establish healthcare all over the globe, stop deforestation, ease the use of fossile fuel, and many, many more things.
And to do this, you get barely a cent.
And even if you do know what you're doing, even a little, you will have trouble. There is very little margin for error, as a few mistakes will send Africa into a continent-wide civil war(As opposed to how it is right now with only parts of it being at war all the time), and you might start nuclear conflicts in Latin America if you don't personally check up on them every turn to make sure they aren't getting ready to use your nuclear power plants for weaponry. Fate of the World is difficult in part because there are a lot of factors involved, and you are told about none of them until shit has already hit the fan.
Make no mistake, it is a difficult game, but it is a great simulator. It simulates production of fossil fuels, transport, energy generation, industry, agriculture, economy, disasters and so much more. But it just doesn't tell you about any of this.
Aside from that, the moral lessons it tries to teach are questionable at best. As the only way so far that I have found to get close to succeeding every time I try is to start a genocide program targetting China, India, the Middle East, and if they keep complaining South Asia too.
Fate of the World teaches you(Or at least, me) that the only way foreward is to kill the asians(Except Japan), and to wipe the Middle East from the map. Africa is to be policed at all times and forcibly kept poor(but educating them) until technology exists to create emissions free power and industry for them.
The Americas and Europe are to be converted to renewable power, with media campaigns focussing on distracting them from the rest of the world. Japan and Oceania are pretty much empty as far as global population is concerned, so just give them a few defences against floods and occasionally some other protection if they need it.(To switch over ALL of Oceania's transports to electric instead of oil based costs the same as all of Europe or North America's for some reason)
Fate of the World is an interesting game that I would recommend for people who enjoy detailed simulators, and don't mind having to figure out everything themselves. But I would certainly not give it to kids.
Worth 10 bucks? I'd say so, if you are one of those people into simulators, or if you've seen someone play it and think you can do better
