”The strongest of all warriors are these two – Time and Patience” (Tolstoy)
In hindsight, the developers couldn’t have chosen a better quote to appear at the beginning of the game. The highly anticipated Republic: The Revolution will test your patience to the limits, and even though it’s not frustrating, you will need all your willpower to finish it. Republic is just the latest victim of a gaming epidemic: a very original and entertaining game, completely obliterated by a disastrous interface and useless features.
Game mechanics
Republic is, for the lack of a better description, a political simulator. Once you get into the game, however, you’ll discover that there is very little that would separate the game from a traditional tycoon title, laced with a sports management simulator and presented as a board game.
You start out as a virtual nobody in the provincial city of Ekaterine in the Republic of Novistrana. When it was still part of the Soviet Union, you saw your parents abducted by a KGB agent who later became the ruler of the new country. You returned home to exact your revenge and free your country from tyranny, or rule it with an iron fist yourself, depending on your preferences. Your first order of the day will be to recruit people willing to help you and build up support in the city.
The game plays in a rather linear fashion through a given set of objectives. Every time you achieve one of your goals, you’ll be given another task until all the quests allocated for a city are finished, after which you move to the next town. The game ends when you clear in this fashion the nation’s capital. Your quest for power starts relatively easy, with you having to recruit people, garner enough support, free political prisoners and blackmail local officials, but later you’ll conduct abductions, form alliances with parts of the government and ultimately overthrow the president.
In order to be able to conduct these actions, you’ll need support points. These are just like resources in other real-time strategy games: there are three of them, and in addition to a token amount of free resources every day, the amount of your daily income will largely depend on how much support you get from various city districts. The whole resource gathering/action is a self-feeding mechanism. Most of your assets will be spent on increasing support while undermining the support for other factions, and you’ll be rewarded with more resources the next day. What’s left over is then used to complete the objectives of the game.
Did I mention other factions? There are several of them, and unless a scripted event gets rid of one, the rest will be a major pain in your backside throughout the game. They will conduct their own business, which mostly means undermining your support and eliminating your henchmen. While the A.I. is decent, the fact that the factions get their free resources every day as well, and the lack of even the most basic diplomacy means that you won’t be able to eliminate any of them.
The game itself employs three different display modes. The extreme close-up mode comes into play when some additional actions are required, such as the convincing game (I’ll get to it in a moment). The rooftop view will float a camera over the city, and you’ll be able to move it around, enjoy the view and occasionally catch some vital information. You’ll spend the most time in the third mode, a 2D map of the city. Here, all the districts are neatly plotted out, with pie charts indicating support for various factions in each district, all the people you are tracking (your own, enemies and neutrals) and actions each faction is committing.
Even though the developers would let you think otherwise, Republic is a turn-based game. Each day is divided into three segments, each of which lasts four minutes. You’ll be able to assign actions to your character and henchmen, and then just sit down and watch the relatively static city map; the rooftop view is entertaining only for the first hour or so. On very rare occasions, I spent the entire four minutes assigning these orders; otherwise I was done in thirty seconds and went on to read a book. While the manual mentions the possibility to speed up the game, the exact method is buried deep in the Readme file found on the CD, and it took me nearly two days to figure it out. Even so, you’ll end up spending more than half of your time doing nothing. I would have paid in gold for an “End turn” button…
In addition to the overall strategic game, there are a few minigames you’ll be playing. While some are rather inept, such as deciding whether to appeal to people’s hearts or minds on a rally, one really stands out as the epitome of a “complicated for the sake of being complicated” model. I’m talking about the conversation system. Every time you are trying to convince a character to do something, you enter a mode where you play cards against your counterpart, with the goal of winning a certain number of rounds. While the manual is one of the best I’ve seen in recent games, it does a very poor job describing the conversation mechanism, and you’ll spend most of the time just clicking aimlessly, in the hopes of winning. (I highly recommend you check out the guide to conversation here; it helped me to understand the whole minigame.)
Technical considerations
Considering the game’s size and complexity, I was surprised how smoothly it ran on my computer. Other than the very high (and unjustified) hardware requirements and very long loading times, I have no complains about the game’s technical performance. Kudos to the development team for releasing a very stable product; a rarity these days.
Gameplay – 5
The basic premise is quite original, and some of the game mechanics very unique. However, I couldn’t help but think that the game was overly complicated for no real reason. Don’t get me wrong, I like complex games. In fact, many of the tycoon games I play are at least as complex as Republic. The problem here is that the additional features seem to be disjointed from the main theme of the game. I simply fail to see any logic in having a political simulator with a card game that depends on luck, while leaving out diplomacy or a more robust public opinion model. The development team didn’t follow the traditional road to success by creating a game that is easy to learn but hard to master. Instead, the learning curve is very steep, but once you climb it, there is noting to master, other than your boredom.
Where the game really suffers is the interface. First of all, the whole 3D view is absolutely useless. While it looks great, all the view does is to inflate the hardware requirements and the whole size of the game. In addition, the camera movements in this view are very awkward, and sometimes I spent the whole segment of a day (4 minutes in real time) trying to zoom on a certain spot, only to be swinging left and right, courtesy of a disastrous camera rotation.
However the two main problems with the interface are the lack of keyboard shortcuts and the lack of a way to end your turns before the time runs out. Neither the manual nor the Readme files list any shortcuts, and given the relatively simple 2D map you’ll spend most of your time in, I would like to be able to use my keyboard only. The lack of an “End turn” button is what really hurts the game. Without it, the game becomes very tedious and will never really grip you into that dreaded “one more turn before bedtime” trap. I spent ten hours to clear the first city, out of which I was playing maybe for an hour; the rest was watching the icons of my characters slowly move across the screen.
Graphics – 8
Let’s forget about the fact that the 3D graphics were totally unnecessary, and take a closer look at them. The cities are what SimCity was supposed to be in the first place. The architecture is very detailed and fitting into the post-Soviet setting. People are very diverse, not only walking but also picking their noses, sneezing, meeting for a drink, etc. I appreciated the fact that I didn’t run into the same people in different parts of the city at the same time. In addition, the game includes weather effects, such as rain and shadows moving across the surfaces as the day progress, which is a nice touch. Furthermore, the 2D design is very clean and hardly even confusing. My only problems were the sometimes awkward animations of the people and awkward camera movements.
Sound – 7
The music is simply superb. James Hannigan, who composed the music, was nominated for the Golden Reel Award for his work on sound in Lost in Space; he is also known for his brilliant score in Privateer: The Darkening, Sim Theme Park and many other games. The music is very fitting and almost brought a nostalgic tear or two into my eyes. However, I have a serious problem with the voiceovers. Being fluent in Russian, my ears threatened to fall off whenever the characters tried their imitation of Russian that sounded to me more like Hungarian spoken backwards. If the developers spent so much time and effort on the game, they should’ve hired a couple of Russian speakers.
Replay value – 5
The replay value suffers once again from the relatively linear gameplay and the inability to end turns before the time limit expires. There are no tasks that are time-sensitive, so it’s relatively easy to simply take over the whole city before even trying to solve any quests, but this makes the game even less entertaining. There is a small remedy in the fact that different characters you can hire develop different skills, but each of the three main ideologies that you can play yields roughly the same effects, so replaying with a new faction isn’t all that attractive. While the gameplay can easily top 40 hours, I’d welcome the ability to shorten it to 10-15 hours when replaying the game. Without this possibility, this title is destined for the shelf or eBay.
Overall – 6.3
Republic: The Revolution aimed not only at resurrecting the political simulation niche, but also at bringing it to a whole new level. Its scope, basic premise and political model deliver on the game’s promises. In addition, the graphics, sound and technical stability show that Eidos didn’t rush the game to the market and instead waited till Exile polished it out. However, the game suffers too much from useless features, the lack of a diplomatic model and a truly bad interface to be attractive to anybody but the most hardcore fans.
