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Describing a game like Republic: The Revolution is no easy task. The project began several years ago, after Demis Hassabis, a man who became a chess master at the age of twelve, founded Elixir Studios. After having made Theme Park at the age of seventeen, and sometime later graduating from Cambridge in computer science, he got an ambitious game design idea that would end up keeping him and his studio working for several years.
The idea was to make a game of political intrigue, action and interesting gameplay. The game was to take place in a remote Soviet republic called Novistrana, and you were to start a revolution against the evil ruler and his oppressive regime. Why you? Well, when you were young your parents were kidnapped by the very same man who sits with the power today, and just then you decided you’d get revenge – somehow.
Starting a revolution is no easy task, and as you can read yourself in the game, one man can start a revolution, but he needs the people to make it happen. At the start of the game you’re given roughly ten questions regarding how you spent the twenty years after the loss of your parents. These questions work much like in old role-playing games like the Ultima games, because they focus on how you’d deal with possible traitors, whether you studied at college, joined an underground boxing club, etc. Answering these questions shape the starting point of your faction; which values you find important, and how you’re likely to deal with certain situations.
Your faction’s ideology is depicted in a somewhat original way. Imagine a top half circle. This half circle is split into three portions, denoting Force, Influence, and Wealth. These three shift during the game, depending on for instance the opinions of the people you headhunt. After answering the questions I mentioned you’re taken to your hometown Ekaterine, which isn’t too big and intimidating, and is meant to let you learn the game mechanics and basically get the hang of the game. Later in the game you progress into a larger city, and finally to the capitol, where the stakes are really high and you’re close to your goal.
Defining the gameplay is the challenging, because you do quite a lot, and much can’t be compared to any other games. At core you can say that Republic: The Revolution is a turn-based 2d game, accompanied by a good 3d engine. There are two view-modes in the game; a building view which is like a really high third-person camera, and then there’s the map view where you can see all the districts of the city, where your faction members and some of its enemies are, and even where some of the important buildings are. There are three types of districts, colored depending upon their support for Force, Influence, or Wealth. Like in the real world, people who share your thoughts are the easiest to make friends with, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to win everyone over.
Each character has certain abilities, like Scout, Investigate, Graffiti, and by choosing one of these places an icon on the next time “slot”. As the day progresses you move onto the next time slot (at the lack of a better word), but so do the competitors – and that’s why the game can be called turn-based.
Republic is open-ended in that you can choose how you want to seize power. The people you recruit to your faction are extremely important, because you’ll need plenty of abilities to actually get somewhere. To make matters a bit trickier you also have to do some resource management. On the top left corner of the screen you can see numbers representing your “number” of Force, Influence, and Wealth. Performing an ability costs a certain number of resources, so you can’t just recklessly do the same actions again and again. There is also a role-playing element involved in the game mechanics, because when your faction members successfully do an action they’re given a number of experience points. When a character reaches a certain limit his level increases, and at that point you can improve his personal statistics, such as charisma, control, status, etc by adding ten points per level. Secondly, the abilities can be upgraded, and new ones can be learned once per level. Specializing in a few abilities is smart, but how you chose to play the game is without a doubt up to you.
The one big problem however, is the lack of interactivity, and lack of good old fun gameplay. Even though there is action in the game, you seldom really interact with the fun stuff, disregarding for instance a conversation mini-game that at least during the beginning of the game isn’t necessary to take part in. While playing what you basically do is to choose what action you want the characters to do, chose the district and/or target, and just watch it all take place. I’m not saying you should've been able to drive the characters around or anything, but I really would’ve liked to see more interactivity. The learning curve is also quite steep, and you can expect to look up in the manual several times. The tutorial is pretty bad, because it merely consists of a number of interface explanations, and very little about what’s smart and what’s not. The interface is actually much to blame, because there IS a lot to figure out, and you should expect to spend time fighting the interface.
Creating what seems like a realistic city isn’t easy, because you obviously have a huge number of buildings that have to seem unique, you have plenty of cars, people, trees, waiters, newsstands, and just so much more. There is actually a huge number of people walking, jogging, or running around. It’s nice to see how each have unique names, that they have tasks more complex than just walking around, so if you follow a regular Joe (or Ivan maybe) off the street he may walk from his house to a newsstand, purchase a newspaper, head over to a restaurant, chat with some people, and then head home. The voice-overs sound okay if you don’t mind dialogue similar to that in The Sims, so even if you’re Russian you won’t be able to make sense of it all. Even though the dialogue might not be too authentic the music is very much so. Typical Russian instruments and styles are used, making the music instantly recognizable. There could perhaps have been a couple more tunes in the playlist, but they’re all so suitable that it works out well.
Authenticity is definitely also apparent when looking at the architecture used on the buildings in the game. The buildings range from your basic warehouse, to huge prisons, casinos, and more. What’s more, on the maximum detail setting EVERY object in the game gets a dynamic shadow! The performance however, isn’t equally great. A lot of people with very potent PCs have had low framerates at times, but if you scale down far enough on the details a lot of people should be able to play the game without any big performance problems. I must say that the characters could’ve used more details, because the faces in particular do look a bit deformed and weird. Of course, most of the time you’re playing far from people’s faces, but it does detract a little when you’re all immersed and stumble across some weird old guy who only looks half-human.
Also worth mentioning about the graphics is that the camera is used much like in a movie. It’s unfortunate that you don’t have more control of the camera, but in a way you can say that it keeps you focused on the tasks at hand.
Conclusion:
This is a game a lot of people have been waiting for. This is a game I really wanted to love, but to be honest I can’t say it fulfilled my expectations. The graphics and audio are both very good, but the gameplay just isn’t all that fun, and the learning curve is without a doubt steep. The difficulty is far from easy, but if you’re willing to put in the time needed to learn the more intricate aspects of Republic then you’re probably in for many fun hours. This is a game with a lot of replay-value, because you can play the game in so many ways, but it takes a certain type of gamer to really be appreciated.
