I played the demo and wrote this in a forum, addressed to Cliffski. I thought it'd also be worth posting here in case anyone felt similarly.
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I felt there wasn't enough "art" (not graphics, I mean artisticness) in the gameplay itself. Democracy 2 had a lot of that, mainly through the quotes and through how everything worked together, it was a fairly sophisticated / philosophical game -- whereas I didn't get a sense of that in Kudos 2.
As an example, I felt the options were a bit too limited, I would have preferred more interesting options -- they were all fairly boring Sims-like options, I would have prefer options with more interest value.
I'm not exactly how to portray what I mean, but I felt as if there weren't much meaning or point to the game, that it was just entertainment or a time waster, that I wasn't learning anything from it, whereas I did feel I was learning a lot from Democracy 1 & 2. It had no wisdom to impart, playing it, you wouldn't actually be better equipped to deal with your 20s.
As a contrast, have you played Alter Ego? It's an old game which you can now play online:
http://www.theblackforge.net/ That game is similar to the Kudos series in a few ways, although it follows your entire life from birth until death, but the gameplay is very similar, and the writing quality and the events that happen there feels more meaningful and memorable than in Kudos 2. I know this is probably too late to change, but I just thought I'd give you my honest impression. It's still a pretty great game, I just think there was a lot of room to make it really great.
Player
