Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall
The confrontation between the East and the West is coming to an end, but not between East and West Germany. The old party leaders are still sitting in their offices, not changing anything and waiting for exclamations from Moscow. But their end is close – Gorbachev and Kohl have already decided...
Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall is a political sim, simulation and strategy game
developed and published by Nostalgames.
Released on March 25th 2018 is available on Windows, MacOS and Linux
in 2 languages: English and Russian.
It has received 685 reviews of which 640 were positive and 45 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.7 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 2.35€ on Steam and has a 60% discount.
The Steam community has classified Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7 SP1+ (32-bit, 64-bit)
- Processor: SSE2 instruction set support
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: DX10 (shader model 4.0) or DX11 with feature level 9.3 capabilities
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 1 GB available space
MacOS
- OS: Mac OS X 10.8+
- Processor: SSE2 instruction set support
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Storage: 1 GB available space
Linux
- OS: Ubuntu 12.04+, SteamOS+
- Processor: SSE2 instruction set support
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Storage: 1 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
I was able to make Romania the predominant socialist superpower and eliminate Deng Xiaoping, utterly based
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A pretty complete simulation game with an amazing number of outcomes. Always fun to play but tricky to master. Maybe more information / tutorials could help, the mechanics feel a bit overwhelming for beginners.
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it is quite the fun little alternative history strategy game. I'm not sure if this game is still being developed in terms of future content but what improvements I would like to see is the ability to turn western nations socialist whilst the game is still going, unlike getting Italy to turn communist at game end. Maybe even a game mode where it's set earlier allowing time for more options to be played out. But overall this game is very neat and as a history buff who loves the ideas of alternative history its just the type of game I love. Highly recommend.
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Although it's not the most polished game, its gameplay is quite fun and the music is great. The fact that each nation has unique events and you can steer it to many different paths makes the game very enjoyable and replayable. It also gives you a lot of context to the end of the cold war era, as the many events pushed me to research more about the fine details of the period. It's a really nice game if you're interested in the cold war and like strategy games.
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This review is proving surprisingly hard to pen. The question isn't over my recommendation: I recommend this game. The issue is who to and why . For video gamers, I won't even point to [I]Ostalgie's[/I] older sibling, [I]Crisis in the Kremlin[/I], or its youngers, China: Mao's Legacy and [I]Collapse[/I], because the chances are if you've played one of those, you've already played this. I could probably say the same to players of Half Earth Socialism . For the rest, if you liked (in order of success and goodness) [I]Twilight Struggle[/I], [I]Republic: The Revolution[/I] or [I]Tom Clancy's Politika[/I], then this game's political machinations on a map of late-Soviet Eastern Europe will appeal. If you like Paradox's grand strategy games and can stand something both set later and pared back, then you'll enjoy this. You should buy it. Tellingly, that list is either based directly off of - or heavily inspired by - extant board game titles. If you liked any of [I]Twilight Struggle[/I], [I]1989[/I], my personal favourite, [I]Wir Sind Das Volk![/I] or - more appropriately - solo efforts like [I]Soviet Dawn[/I] or [I]Gorbachev: The Fall of Communism[/I], stop reading and buy this now - especially if you got to the bottom of that list. For historians, it's simpler: like me, you undoubtedly appreciate both exploring [I]how history happened but also considering what if key moments had happened differently. Assuming you share my own keen interest in Cold War history, then you're all set. You should also buy this. For everyone else, I'm not saying don't buy it, I'm just saying: understand that this game occupies one hell of a niche, brilliantly, no doubt, but a niche. So what's going on here? Imagine you're given a time machine set to New Year's Day 1989, any leader's desk in the Eastern Bloc upon which to lay up your feet and three years to re-write (or succumb to) history. That's [I]Ostalgie[/I] in a nutshell. Over the course of those three years, you'll pull a variety of levers that will shape both the fate of the world and your fate as a leader. The bulk of the game sees events pop up on a functional map of Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa that demand your response in a visual novel-esque format. You'll read a page of history (or alt history as you start to break the timeline) and be given options to pick from. To really encourage exploration of the alternatives, the game will tease those unavailable to you and give a vague hint as to how they might be unlocked on future playthroughs. Secondary to this is your interactions with each country. Trading, interfering with regimes, influencing ongoing conflicts and either forming or joining military and/or economic alliances are all on the table to varying degrees. There are [I]some[/I] constraints to the simulation to keep things reasonably grounded while leaving plenty of interesting choices, and lining up what's usually a list of factors to make things happen is engaging. Crucially, I should point out that warfare is not such an option. Fine by me, potentially disappointing to some of you. Lastly is your own country. Thankfully, the game eschews micromanagement in favour of splitting the nation into the four compass points plus the capital into which you easily lay down a small roster of structures. You can similarly play with your nation's political system with some sliders that can be adjusted once a month, affecting your overall economic liberalisation, civic freedoms and overall political model. The last major system, research, feels comparatively underdeveloped (at least from my initial playthroughs). All of this, though, will be to stave off defeat. Like all good solo games, [I]Ostalgie has many ways to lose: your party, your people, creeping Westernisation and the state of the economy (good or ill, it can depend) will see the boot (or knife) that removes you from office come from within. That's all before we get to the USSR or NATO deciding they've rather had enough of you. Manage those, though, and like all good sandboxes, you quickly discover that it has no particular way to win , since you set the goal yourself. That's where you can strap a pair of ICBMs to what if? and let it fly to all manner of consequences, and this is where [I]Ostalgie[/I] gets both its most interesting and educational. The base game lets you take the reins in East Germany, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. DLCs, meanwhile, add Albania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Cuba, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia (and in turn, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Croatia) to the game. The Paths of History DLC adds yet more events. Even at full price, they're inexpensive, and a steal on sale. Again, a caveat (but not criticism) to point out: the USSR is not playable, neither are any of the Western nations. I've only explored [I]Ostalgie[/I] as the GDR so far , but already played towards some fascinating-yet-bizarre outcomes, none of them involving the fall of the Berlin Wall. In one, the GDR usurped the USSR as leader of the Communist bloc, forming both a new Warsaw Pact and CMEA that counted members as unlikely as Ireland and Greece, had Yemen as a leading oil producer and China as its foremost client state. In another, the GDR threw open its borders, liberalised and became an economic powerhouse counting the USA as its best friend. In yet one more, my gameplay inadvertently realised a mixture of Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism or PKD's [I]Minority Report[/I]. Crucially, while the game by no means condemns your choices (except with one of the defeat conditions) it by no means celebrates them, either. Should you make it to 1992 (or, if you choose, beyond) then the game will serve up a summary of what happens to your country next. This is no victory screen, and the tone is importantly one that simply states what could have happened rather than how it feels about it. For the inquiring historian, then, there's a lot of exploring to do here. All of it is presented on a functional UI, albeit one that won't be winning any beauty awards and in some ways feels charmingly budget. If anything, my main complaint is that the translation of the game, while by no means atrocious, could still do with a bit of polish. On the one hand, that can also feel amusingly on point, but some sentences take a bit more effort to parse or wrap your head around than others and can even lead you to misunderstanding some decisions. It seems that big updates to the game stopped being pushed a while back, so we probably can't count on this being seen to in the future. Sound design is minimal, notwithstanding the inclusion of actual music from the era and places in the game, and since this includes both propaganda and national anthems, your mileage will of course vary massively dependent on where you were in 1989 and whether or not you then hit the mute button or pop on some 80s chart instead. A last observation from me: the learning curve is steep. Like grand strategy games, you'll gradually learn what happens when, how to trigger certain events and what the outcomes of choices are, setting yourself up for 'runs'. This, of course, takes time, trial and lots of error, the which if you enjoy is another reason to pick the game up. That said, while it's taken dozens of hours for me to master even the start of one nation in the likes of Europa Universalis , an evening's play will see you getting your head round most of the game's mechanics and your first nation here. Like I said, I absolutely recommend [I]Ostalgie[/I] in the same way I recommend the board games it so clearly draws inspiration from and the history books that have undoubtedly been read during its design - it's a fascinating sandbox to find out how 1989 [I]could have gone and what it would have meant for the world. I'm interested to see what else it can teach me.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 21 November 2024 05:00 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 17 December 2024 10:01 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:42 |
| Steam reviews | 22 December 2024 13:52 |
Online players
10
Developer
Nostalgames
Publisher
Nostalgames
Release
25 Mar 2018
Platforms