The first thing you will note about the Political Machine is that it has superb art direction. Cartoon caricatures of the various historical candidates and a big colorful map, that comprises the main screen you will be looking at, give it a very nice look and feel. The game is easy to use, simple to learn, and a lot of fun to play.

You begin as a person of your choosing (anyone from William Taft to John Kerry) and are then pitted against candidates from the opposing party in a type of campaign mode. As you win, you advance and face a harder candidate until you eventually beat them all. It is an interesting take and a good deal of fun.

If you do not like managing a real politician, you are also free to create your own. There are a number of attributes to assign points to, and a bunch of fitting character drawings to go with it.

Your goal is to win enough Electoral College votes necessary to win the White House before Election Day. You can do this by traveling around the country, giving speeches on topics that resonate with voters, picking a good VP candidate, using him or her correctly, strategically recruiting and using the various campaign specialists you earn during the campaign and buying advertising in key states. To fund all this, you also need to do a lot of fundraising. Just like real life, a big war chest goes a long way.

The main screen is a large map of the USA with each state red or blue depending on the latest polls. It is a tug-o-war with your opponent to keep as many states in your color as possible. You have to be mindful to secure endorsements from key groups, and balance what you do. Going to Texas and spouting off on gun control will not help you much, just as explaining your love of the war may not help you in California.

The topics you can discuss in your ads, speeches and on TV appearances (more on this later) are quite wide and what you chose should depend largely on the interests of the people in the state you are currently courting. Mostly they are topical to today, which is a bit a blessing and a curse. I am sure it helped during the election run-up when the game was released, but it dates it a bit over time. The current war is usually a key issue.

One very interesting twist is TV appearances. You are offered chances to appear on shows that happen to resemble famous newscasts like Larry King. There you will be posed questions and given a series of answers to chose and a time limit to pick. How you handle yourself can really hit you in the polls. Say something stupid and the election may be lost, but say all the right things, and see your numbers jump.

Your political affiliations also matter. Various campaign views obviously resonate differently across the political spectrum. If you play a Republican, you need to tell them about your Republican views, or alienate your own supporters. You cannot just run around and say what the majority wants to hear and expect to win every time.

The downside of the game is that the computer is often not very bright. In most elections, you can pull of a victory by strategically dedicating your resources to a few key states (California, Florida, New York and Texas) that make up a huge part of the electoral vote. For example, I lost the popular vote by over seven million in one campaign, but still came out on top by carrying all the important states save Texas. How I can pull this off? Often the computer characters will run around trying to win states that have almost no votes, and they often seem to want them just as much as key states. This is a shame as it often makes victory too easy.

Another drawback of the game is that it can get highly repetitive. Once you learn how to win the key states, you spend all your time running around and making sure, they stay blue or red as the case may be. Replayability is there, as the basic game is quite fun, but there is not much variety to it. You can only enjoy this game for so long before it goes on the shelf, but at a bargain price, this is to be expected.

The game does offer a few different ways to play. Besides campaign mode and a single quick campaign, you can also play in a fantasy mode, where you set up the otherwise semi-randomly generated political climate before the election. Perhaps, you wish to run in a civil war political environment or a time with a horrible economy. This makes for some interesting, if largely superficial, options.

Overall, The Political Machine is a very solid, generally bug free and well-presented game. It is absolutely simple to use, but has enough complexities to make it interesting. The art direction is impeccable, and the background music un-obtrusive. It lacks somewhat in computer AI, but makes up for it with addictive game play. It is by no means a classic, but it is definitely worth the relatively inexpensive price tag.