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Review
Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.
I’ve played the previous two Social Democracy games, and enjoyed them even if I didn’t fully understand what I was doing most of the time. The same goes for Popular Front. I played on normal difficulty, and found it much more approachable than Petrograd 1917, where I felt like I was chasing an endless amount of tails while being thrown to the wolves in that game. At least in Popular Front, it felt like the wolves were polite enough, though this may also be chalked up to my prior experience with the series.
You take control of the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière/French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO for short) political party, and must create and lead a coalition strong enough to endure workers strikes, political infighting, and fascism both at home and abroad. Gameplay uses the same systems as previous Social Democracy games - take actions through advisors on a 6 month basis or through randomly drawn cards. Every month or so historical events, economic disasters, or angry factions/parties will come up and throw a wrench in your plans.
In my first playthrough, I came to a quick game over (Spoiler - click to show)when I didn’t enact strike demands, causing the SFIO to be kicked out of the ruling coalition and fall into obscurity. My second playthrough went all in against domestic fascism, pro-workers rights (but leaving the capitalist structure unchanged), and checking off every goal in the Popular Front’s platform. My greatest woes were budget, an uncertain economy, and appeasing the Senate, the Radical-Socialists, the French Communist Party, and internal division among the SFIO - I spent the majority of advisor actions just to lower party and coalition dissent to a reasonable amount.
Honestly, internal affairs were more stressful than Germany itself. France easily repelled German attack with two rounds of defensive-focused rearmament and UK aid. I’m not sure if that’s the intended difficulty, as I couldn’t (Spoiler - click to show)take the option to persuade the UK during the Munich conference because they thought I was too weak, so I thought I’d be crushed but turns out not. I consistently caused 100,000 casualties for the Germans and 00,000 among my troops, which might be a bug?
I found other things that I think were oversights (in the foreign relations storylet, Poland’s relationship status doesn’t display and it also won’t let you back out like it does with other countries so you are forced to send diplomats there), plus what could be a display error in the stats sidebar (Popular Front enthusiasm went from none to 8.194577954319762 after a propaganda campaign in July 1938, and continued to be displayed in numbers instead of words for some time; a small difference between the Defense and War sections where armor divisions production is 0.25/month in Defense, 0/month in War, all other division productions were the same between both sections).
At the end of my playthrough, the final outcome of the war is uncertain, and the SFIO would probably get trounced come election time, but France, and the Popular Front, endures. When I reached the end, I had much more of an urge to replay this game compared to the previous two Social Democracies.
