Budget Hero is a game designed to teach people about the federal budget. The players can view the current federal spending plan or can modify it by adding or removing plans.

Budget Hero is presented in an abstracted manner. At the beginning of the game the player is prompted to select three of eight badges, each of which represent a general spending concept, like "Energy Independence" or "National Security." The goal of the game is to modify the federal spending to align with your three badges and reduce the federal debt as much as possible to delay the budget bust. The spending allocations are represented by various buildings, their height being equivalent to the money spent on them. For example, "Health Care" and "Science & Nature" are two of the nine buildings. In addition, the player can modify the taxes to bring in additional income.

I enjoyed the graphics, they are very colorful and stylized and all fit together well. There are a few minor issues such as the cards at the top of the screen being cut off; but it has no real effect on the game play. The sound is loud and has no volume control; and many of the sound effects are annoying -- they sound like computer error beeps.

The tutorial in the beginning is good -- it is skippable, voiced, and concise. Nevertheless, the game is complex enough that it took me a couple minutes of bumbling around before I really understood it. The help system in the game is easy to access and brings up the information needed; I found it to be very useful when learning the game.

I started the game knowing nothing about the federal budget, but now I feel I have a fairly strong, if rudimentary, grasp of it. The game also helped me solidify what ideas I thought were good and bad by forcing me to balance them with cost.

One of my favorite features is the ability to compare your spending and score to people around the world. You can sort by age range, location, political affiliation, income, and gender. I enjoyed being able to very easily see the general differences in ideals based on these results. Unfortunately, there aren't enough results online (yet) to get really consistent comparative results; but I still enjoy being able to see what other people did differently.

The game is very enjoyable -- it plays like a puzzle game, but has a lot to teach about the different spending ideas that people have. Anyone could understand the concepts behind it; but only those of high school age and above will really get much out of it.