Victoria 3 Review
Paradox Interactive’s grand strategy games are known for their uncompromising scope and depth in recreating entire eras of history, but never before have they attempted something quite so dizzyingly complex as Victoria 3. Modeling every single human alive in the world-changing century from 1836 to 1936, their hopes and desires, their joy and wrath, and how they feel about the price of new deck chairs, the simulated world before you is a marvel to behold. And what's even more incredible is that it's not merely a curiosity or a tech demo. Aside from a moderate helping of launch-day jank, it mostly works, and serves as the basis for a deeply engrossing sociopolitical strategy game.
It's only fair to give a warning straight off that Victoria 3 is dense, detailed, and by its nature, full of mechanics that require you to do some proactive detective work to understand them. I love that stuff, personally. But for the uninitiated, finding your way around its quirks and pitfalls during the first couple campaigns is likely to be daunting. Even as someone with a combined 4,000 hours, give or take, across Paradox's other franchises, I struggled at first.
There is a dynamic tutorial scenario in which you can play as any country, and that will give you a grasp of the basics but not necessarily set you up for mastery. The best teaching resources Victoria 3 offers are a nested tooltip system, and the ability to select "Tell Me How" and "Tell Me Why" on important game concepts. This is something I'd love to see in more strategy games, since simply explaining what all the buttons do – Tell Me How – usually doesn't give you a working idea of when to press them – Tell Me Why. Even with all of that, though, I would still rank Victoria 3 as one
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