What are the most Marxist or at communist-friendly games?
All I know are
Marxist or AES-Positive
- Disco Elysium
- Atom RPG
- Civilization 1-4
- Metro Exodus
- Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic
- Red Faction Guerilla
Anti-Capitalist
- Pathologic 2
- Red-Dead Redemption 2
- Fallout New Vegas
- Hitman
Potentially Based
- 35mm (Sergey Noskov, Sometimes You)
- In the Rays of Light (Sergey Noskov, Sometimes You)
- Frost Punk
Hammer & Sickle is a (rather obscure) Russian turn-based squad tactics game (which is basically a third Silent Storm game, despite not having the title or branding, it's weird). It's set in 1949, and you play as a Soviet agent who infiltrates into Allied-occupied Germany and ends up stumbling on a bunch of neo-fascist terrorist plots to start WW3. I posted some spoiler-ific dialogue from it a long time ago.
It doesn't necessarily have any deep theory in it, but it has some good bits. It's one of the few games (and really, pieces of media in general) I know of to actually bring up the fact that a whole bunch of Nazis ended up working for the West after WW2. It also has some pretty based characters - along your possible squad members, you have a Spanish anarchist (who actually fought for the Soviets on the Eastern Front) and a Polish Jew who's become a Nazi hunter specifically because of his disappointment at how little the Allies are actually doing to prosecute the fuckers. Another character is this forester, who has one of the most based lines I've ever heard in a game - when he says he used to help Jews during the war, the protagonist asks him "ah, so you're an anti-fascist", and he responds simply "I'm a human being".
You also get to disable a nuke by shooting at it with a gun and get personally awarded a medal by Stalin in the best ending (off-screen, but still), so that's cool. It can, unfortunately, be a rather difficult and obtuse game at times, there's a bunch of time-sensitive missions in it, but that also leads to another really neat bit about it, which is that the plot is pretty flexible and has branches for you failing stuff. You don't really get a simple "Game Over" screen unless your protagonist dies, the worst you can get is drawing enough attention to yourselves that the US Army hunts you down and you get an unwinnable final fight, but that's rare, normally if you fuck up you simply get the "well, we didn't prevent WW3, so might as fight in it" branch where you get a final (winnable this time) mission to capture some bridge and help a Soviet Armored division cross over into the Allied occupation zone.
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The whole Silent Storm series is amazing (the original, the standalone expansion pack Sentinels, and Hammer & Sickle which I count as being part of the series since it literally has the same engine, assets, base gameplay, and even references the plots of the previous ones).
One really cool thing about them is they have very extensive enviromental destruction. It doesn't have a super-detailed physics simulation to it (so you won't see things actually collapse by falling over for example, if the engine runs a calculation and figures out that a particular bit of the level geometry doesn't have anything to stand on, it will just evaporate in a cloud of particle effects instead of falling to the ground), but it's still amazing, and it adds a lot to your tactical flexibility. One of your characters heard an enemy in the other room (which in the game is represented by having a silhouette showing an approximate position)? Well, you can just shoot through the wall. Locked door in your way? Why bother picking it when you can just have your machinegunner unlock it with a belt of 8mm Mauser.
They're also really cool to play if you're a gun nerd, they feature a lot of more obscure WW2-era weaponry, and probably the largest variety of grenade types and explosives I've ever seen (you can literally throw jars of pure nitroglycerin, which is rather ill-advised in real life).
Unfortunately all the physics stuff is really heavy and sometimes, in particularly extreme cases of destruction, the game will just have to sit there for a minute running calculations, and this isn't something that gets fixed by running it on modern hardware (since I'm guessing it only uses one core, although I haven't tested it, but it's from the age before it was clear that multi-core was the direction CPUs would go in, a lot of games from that time have no support for multi-threading).