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Thursday 3 March, 2016
3rd Entry:
For this entry, I will talk about chapter 3 and the sandbox mode in the game.
Chapter three starts with a riot. The player is transferred into a new prison and things are clearly a mess. There are 90-something prisoners rioting and a load of injured guards. It's important to immediately start hiring doctors or getting paramedics to treat the wounded. Part of the compound is ablaze (again!). After treating some of the wounded, I sent riot police into the various parts of the compound under the control of the prisoners, accompanied by paramedics. Interestingly, the prisoners would target the police pretty much exclusively, leaving the paramedics to heal my troops. Simultaneously, I had to deal with the fire in the other wing of the prison. It was a total mess.
Soon, though, the reality of the motivations for the riot was brought to light: corruption. It turns out that the prison administration was destroying documents that would have secured the release of prisoners, keeping them in the prison and ensuring constant money flow for the prison. The prisoners had rioted and taken the administration as hostages, warning that if their headquarters were attacked that they would kill everyone there. I don't think that there was actually any way to stop them from doing this.
Given the situation, I definitely felt some empathy for the plight of the prisoners, knowing that they were being cheated by the system. They didn't have a lot of recourse, with their connection to justice outside of the prison cut off by the administration. Nevertheless, I had to squelch the riot, meaning that a great many prisoners died in the process. The riot police definitely kicked some ass in the process of retaking the compound, and a great many prisoners died -- along with a few of the police. I hadn't necessarily anticipated how well-armed the rioters would be.
To be honest, I finished this mission as quickly as possible. The alternative part of the mission involves rebuilding the prison after the riot, which seemed like a nightmare ... and somewhat unrealistic. In reality, I assume that most of the prisoners would have been transferred to another facility while repairs were underway, but that wasn't an option in the game -- something I found unrealistic and annoying.
As I said in the beginning of this response, I also tried the sandbox mode. Unlike the campaign mode, the sandbox mode is definitely more about the battle against finite resources. At the beginning of the game, there are so many things that you need to construct with limited tools. The sandbox mode was instead about optimizing the order of construction. First priorities were housing, food, power, water, and administrative offices. The player, though, has to be careful not to build any one thing too big too quickly. Otherwise, it's very easy to run out of resources.
But after building a few of the necessities, it's easy to lose your control of the facility without knowing why ... the psychologist for this reason is incredibly important, someone I neglected to hire early on, which caused problems (a small riot). Over time, certain things become more and more important. For instance, starvation and overcrowding are things to be avoided obviously, but the prisoners needs pretty quickly turn to things like entertainment and family visitation (the latter being something I forgot to anticipate originally). Later, though, things like literacy and work become important.
It's also very difficult to build a prison efficiently from the outset. There may be a way to best optimize the layout of the compounded, but it's hard to do that while also rushing to deal with each new crisis that comes up.
Anyway, I had fun with this game, and I thought it overall did a good job reflecting some of the problems of the prison system as a whole.
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