Graphics: Because this release is intended to be used in schools as well as the home, its system requirements must be fairly low. Global Conflicts: Palestine is rendered in a fairly non-descript 3D, third person perspective. While most of us have seen significantly better graphics in many games over the past three years, the visuals here are functional and convey the scenery of the world in which you pursue your news articles.

Interface: There are relatively few controls in this title. Most keyboard commands deal with moving the camera around or calling up the map and notebook. The rest of the game is played using the mouse to select dialog and where you move. Despite the simplicity of the interface, it suffers from three glaring problems.

First, it’s impossible to change key bindings. Being an old gamer, I remember a time in PC gaming when there was no such thing as changing key bindings; however, this is the 21st century; there’s no excuse for not having this simple feature included. I spent the first hour of gameplay swearing at the screen because I couldn’t set the camera controls to my preferred configuration. Whether there are four controls or 40, it’s always a good idea to allow players to adjust such things. For teachers worried about class clowns who change the key bindings at random, a simple “Reset to Defaults” button puts an end to such mischief.

Second, there’s a flawed game design decision when it comes to the notebook wherein you keep the quotations collected during interviews. When interviewing anyone, whenever you wish to quote them, you simply press a button and the notebook creates an article-ready quotation. This part of the interface should make the interviewing process easy; however, the notebook can only hold a maximum of five quotations. Furthermore, it can’t be accessed while you’re in a conversation. This might seem unimportant until you conduct your first interview with an expert. Suddenly, you find yourself using up all the quotation slots before the conversation is over because each step in the conversation produces better and more newsworthy information. Because you can’t access the notebook and delete quotations in the middle of an interview, you can’t clean up quotations that are no longer relevant or newsworthy based on something you’ve just learned. Furthermore, once you have a conversation with someone, you might not ever have that same conversation with them again. I understand the effect Serious Games wanted to achieve. By limiting the quotations you can take, you can’t abuse the article writing process at the end of each mission; however, it would have been better if there were either more slots to save quotations or it were possible to delete useless quotations during interviews. To illustrate the point, there were at least three occasions when I restarted a mission after I accidentally entered into an interview and all my quotation slots were already full.

Third, there are a number of misspellings in various conversations. Normally, this would barely be worth mentioning, but in an educational title, they bear special mention, even if they’re not of the ridiculous “All Your Base” variety.

Gameplay: For a game that doesn’t rely on a player-oriented conflict, Global Conflicts: Palestine is fairly fun to play. From the moment you begin a mission until the very end when you publish your article, you find yourself faced with difficult decisions ranging from “How do I ask Omri about his treatment of Palestinian prisoners?” to “Should I include statements from my own kidnappers in my next article?” To be sure, such examples are not of the adrenaline pumping variety, but they represent interesting gameplay and will hold your attention.

In terms of the educational component, this title does an amazing job of presenting the controversial nature of the conflict. Rather than attempt to create a linear, unbiased curriculum of education, the creators instead chose to embrace a program that has many different voices, each offering its unique outlook on the conflict. Players see that even two people with the same pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli sympathies have a wide range of views on many different issues related to the conflict, making it clear that no one with a stake in the conflict is a cookie-cutter ideologue of anyone else. While people with a thorough background in the conflict won’t learn anything new, teens and adults who know only what they occasionally see on CNN or Fox News will find various conversations in the game enlightening.

There’s one further impressive aspect of the educational component of this release: since your character is a reporter, and part of the game is publishing news articles, the game teaches the player about media bias. Even before Global Conflicts: Palestine is over, you’ll become aware that there’s really no such thing as unbiased media coverage. Merely deciding which quotations to use creates small amounts of bias and changes your alignment when the article is published. Furthermore, if someone doesn’t trust you enough, you might fail to get the best quotation from them, further changing what your article can say. This doesn’t mean that the game teaches players to be unethical propagandists or brainless tabloid journalists; on the contrary, it illustrates that even the most responsible journalists can’t always remain unbiased in their reporting. The point was driven home to me after I finished after playing through the game with the goal of being completely unbiased. Despite my best efforts, I had a slightly closer alignment to one faction than the other.

Sound FX: I found the audio to be unremarkable. Aside from traffic, calls to prayer in Abu Dis and people murmuring to one another, there aren’t many sound effects to be heard.

Difficulty: The first time you play through a mission, it seems like the game is too easy. Then you begin constructing an article at the end of the mission, and suddenly it becomes apparent that you don’t have enough quality quotations to even make page six of your newspaper. In this title, the devil is in the details. Despite replaying the same mission multiple times, I have yet to produce a perfect article that’s front page material. Players with a healthy obsession for being perfect will find many more hours of play than initially apparent.

Overall: Global Conflicts: Palestine is an ambitious title. It takes up the challenge of being an educational game that teaches people about a controversial topic, and succeeds. As both an avid gamer and an academic, I’d recommend this game to teachers who need to educate 13-19 year olds who are unfamiliar with the problems in the region.