I made a hundred millions of profit investing in weaponry and actively lobbying to push some third-world country into civil war.
I am a good human.

I single handedly fueled wars, bankrupted entire companies, criminalized the legislative government, became an informant for the feds and created the biggest market crash in human history. I am the stock.

This game is really entertaining and makes a good caricature of finance culture. The stock market mechanics are satisfying and I enjoyed playing that out. However the campaign is really short and doesn't actually take into account what you did. I was making a killing by playing it straight so I never used the cheaty tools but the game just assumed I was and doing it poorly. I'd love a version where playing the market takes longer and is more challenging OR one that actually reacts to whether or not you are breaking the law.

The game needs some work thats for sure. Genuinely, surprised the creators of the game didn't make the game a lead up to 2008 financial crisis. This would make for a very interesting game as it would get harder and harder to make money... Genuinely devs, if you want to create an expansion that revolves around this idea I would buy it thats for sure!

Rating this game is difficult, but I had no bugs, I had zero issues, really the only problem I'd say I had was it was a bit short, and theres no endless mode. Oh, and theres no save option which seems like a horrid choice. The story really isn't that great either which is sad. But honestly, if you're here for the story... Why? This is a stock market game...


Anyway, 7/10, great idea, could have been implemented better, and had more content.

All of the stress of working on Wall Street with none of the money or long-term consequences.

Go all in on oil, up 50%. Oil flash crashes, down 100%. 10/10 would go bankrupt again.

The game is dull and has no content. Everything the game has to offer gets shown to you within the first hour or so.
The gameplay consists of you looking at the games version of tweets and then buying or shorting stock accordingly.
There is no tactics involved with it at all. Tweet say stock go up? Buy stock, then sell it a couple ingame hours later.
Tweet say stock go down? Short it and buy back the position a few ingame hours later.

You can influence the price of certain goods / materials via lobbying but the mechanic essentially is just you spending cash to make the price of something go up or down. None of your actions have any lasting consequences. Within an ingame day everything is back to normal.

You can't destabilize another ocuntries economy and there are no dynamic events such as forest firest or similar that will impact you in the long term.
At the end of the day you get paid private money that you can use to buy houses that will generate you additional private money whose sole purpose is to... buy more houses.

You can't upgrade your workstation, you can't get your own office. Nothing.

The UI is atrocious. It takes up way too much space. It's a shame since the game gives you 4 monitors. Two of which are useless, the other one you only look at once per day, if at all.
The devs easily could have implemented a system that'd let you buy monitors, view multiple monitors at the same time and put the information you want freely on the monitor to let you customize your workspace but no. None of that is in the game.

After the day ends you can spend cash to increase the friendship level with your co-workers. As far as I can tell, this does nothing. All it does is be a cash sink.

The last goal of becoming managing director is literally not achievable. The goalpost gets moved further and further back whenever you are about to achieve it.
The game isn't even giving you the satisfaction of owning everything. No, when you reach a certain amount of stocks owned the game resets your progress, forcing you to do the dull grind all over again. Your reward are upgrades such as "25% more dividends" or "50% increased trade volume" - The trade volume one feels insulting because really the default trade volume should be much higher than it is. It's just more padding for a game that consists of only padding.

On top of that, the game doesn't follow its own rules. It introduces "Danger Zones" but then prices don't rebound or crash when you purposefully navigate the prices inside of them, the danger zone just "vanishes" and nothing happens.
Sometimes you lose public order despite not even using lobbyists. In my last playthrough I got game overed because somehow the game thought I lowered public order, when in truth, my public order went UP because I DIDN'T USE ANY LOBBYISTS.

So either the game is buggy or it doesn't follow the rules and boundaries it sets. It's frustrating.

This game is one wasted opportunity. It would have been nice if you could have worked your way up into owning the company, paying off politicians, influencing politics and the world at large. Instead what you get is a mindless clicker game that has you achieving absolutely nothing.

Buy this game when it's on sale for 3€ or so, it hardly is worth more than that.

Read the full review here: https://saveorquit.com/2021/05/29/review-the-invisible-hand-2/

Invisible Hand is a screed against the financial industry dressed in black humor and then further wrapped in the guise of token gameplay to get players to sit through the story the game was made to convey to players.

The gameplay elements are mostly what you would expect - stocks go up and down in value according to random events in the background you can follow through a Twitter analogue on the left side of your screen. You can buy stocks low and sell high normally, called a "long", but you can also "short" stocks, borrowing and selling high then trying to buy them back low to make money at someone else's loss. (Whose loss? Who cares, probably some guy thinking he could retire's retirement account.) This means that if you're on top of the trends, you can make money both with stocks going up and down.

You can also make those trends, because you can lobby governments to either help or harm a given industry or even a whole nation's economy. This is the "Invisible Hand" the title refers to, and the main argument above and beyond the usual arguments to more heavily regulate the financial industry that this game makes. By deliberately tanking a market, you can make money shorting it, profiting off of other people's losses, or even outright destabilizing whole nations or even the global market while doing nothing to help the economy, yourself, all for your own personal profit. [Insert Bond villain laugh here.]

The game is also highly critical of the toothlessness of financial regulators when the people who make the laws are in the pockets of the same big-money industries they are trying to regulate. The game starts you off with an ethics questionnaire where the firm has already pre-filled in the correct answers so you can just punch "continue" without even bothering to read them, and further has the woman overseeing your taking of the test insult you if you do take the time to read them. It helps set the tone for the game overall.

Significant spoilers follow: At the end of the game, after letting the player do many terrible things, it holds its metaphorical trial for the financial industry by putting the player on trial literally. This ending is, however, a massive misstep for the game, as it undercuts the black humor theme by just outright having the prosecutor try to get you convicted of being a bad, bad, no good person who should feel bad. A better version of this trial would have the player's crimes laid out, and then the judge throws it out because manipulating stock markets to personal gain through lobbying is not a crime because lobbyists successfully got it legalized, so the player walks off scott-free, giving the message that these crimes are possible until someone stops the rich from getting away with whatever crimes they want. Instead, it's a moment of seriousness that should be the core of the game's message, but then it still gets blown off as soon as that moment is over, and you can just pay a fine and go straight back to doing the crimes that someone was just declaring you were going down for life for committing. Its a total tonal whiplash, and it leaves the game stumbling at the very end.

There's a total lack of subtlety in what the game is doing... that said, looking at the other reviews, it seems no amount of bluntness is blunt enough, as people still seem to be rating this game purely on whether it is a good stock broker simulator. I have to admit, there's a certain line you have to balance between spelling it out for the kids in the back of the class and ruining the tone for the people paying attention, but this still feels like it stepped too far on the speaking VEEERY LOOOUUUD AND SLOOOOW side.

Another major tonal weakness that the game has in trying to make its criticisms land is that the game only lets you see things from the perspective of the guy staring at a stock ticker, flushing economies down the toilet to see his own personal number score go up - which is part of the point of the game, for sure - yet it needs to do more than just tell you that bad stuff happened somewhere else in a news report you don't even have to pay attention to, you need to see the actual negative consequences of your actions for them to connect the way that the game seems to want them to. As it stands, you see far more consequences to your rival co-workers that all wind up being fired for failing to make as much money as you do, and they're basically all psychopaths played for laughs.

All told, as a game, it's paced well, in that it rolls out new mechanics fairly regularly and doesn't overstay its welcome, but you probably won't get more than about 10 hours of this game before feeling bored. As a story, it has a message worth telling, and makes some decent jokes in furtherance of that goal, but it really doesn't stick the landing.

So, I'm going to be honest, at first the game seems really cool and realistic and can be fun at the start, but. The game's campaign is stupidly short and shouldn't take longer than 1 - 2 hours. The game becomes very repetitive and feels like you are just doing the same thing over and over again. It is not worth the price of 15 dollars for just a few hours of gameplay. Not recommended.

4th updated review here: Game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good man, you can do anything and play this ♥♥♥♥ in the backround. Girlfriend talking to you about her day? Play this while you listen. Annoying friend joins the discord? Play this. It's a fun game, just don't take it too serious.