Republic - The Revolution - A Failed Coup?

Thanks to Eurogamer for their review of Elixir's Republic:The Revolution for PC, discussing the previously-featured strategy title that has you taking control of the fictional Eastern European country of Novistrana. The review points out: "...it's quite amazing how much opinion among gamers is already polarized by Republic: The Revolution", but concludes by suggesting "...this is a slightly above average political simulation title which would have probably worked better as a board game than as a videogame, shackled down with a 3D engine that serves no useful purpose and is almost entirely non-interactive." A review at GamesDomain is slightly more forgiving, but has similar views: "Freeform, subtle, complex, rather dry, and just the tiniest bit (appropriately enough) oppressive, Republic: The Revolution is likely to sharply divide gamers."

Comments

That's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

because this looks and sounds like an absolutely amazing game. The setting is really unique, and those screenshots make it look a whole lot more interesting than they say it is.

Can anyone name anything similar to this title? I may even give this a try just to see for myself.

Re:That's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I heartily recommend Hidden Agenda, a game from the early 90s which puts you in the role of newly elected president of a little Central American banana republic. A surprisingly tense and thoughtful game for its time.

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/proj/sw/games/hi dden-agenda.html

Re:That's too bad

[Ceyan]

It's sort of like another Sim game, but this time you're a trying to start a revolution, instead of build a city or something. The problem with the game is that you assign your tasks for your people to do over the course of the day (three phases in each day), and sit back and watch. It takes quite some time for anything to happen (which I've got patience and I love games that require critical thinking, so it wasn't a big deal for me), most of your time is spent doing tasks that seem mundane and repetitive (well, they are reptitive).

I'd highly suggest trying it if you can enjoy extreme micro-management and politics. However, the thing you have to get past is the fact that you spend several minutes just staring at your screen with short bouts of interaction in-between. That's because you can give orders as far in advance as you want, and (as I mentioned above) change just doesn't happen all that fast. The time-compression really doesn't help much either, because at the fastest speed it still takes roughly a minute or two (didn't actually time it) to pass one phase of the day.

I enjoy it personally because it's one hell of a challenge overall, and because it's a new concept. I'd probably see if you could borrow it from a friend, wait for a demo, or buy it from a place you can return it before decided to stick with it. As the Gamespot review mentioned, it's going to seriously divide gamers between 95% that hate it with a passion, and the 5% that will form another eternal underground cults that rise up for those games that require too much thinking for most people to deal with.

(BTW, that last line wasn't meant as an insult, it's just true that most people who don't play games like Republic because it's simply too much to worry about, and they play games for pure actiony goodness and not to think about things)

Re:That's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Just out of curiosity, what is the gameplay like? Is it alot of repetitve minor tasks to achieve smaller goals that build on each other, or does it have more careful planning for one large event? (bombings, burning the reichstag, that sort of thing)

Re:That's too bad

[Ceyan]

Half and half. Part of the whole deal is to simply build support for your cause, which is a bunch of reptitive minor tasks. On the other hand there ARE actions that make life interesting and cause some mayhem. I haven't gotten to any personally (but I haven't played very far either) but I've heard on the GameFAQs forums that you can spark riots, set fires, order beat downs, etc...

Re:That's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing about that is that once it's done, it's the same thing every single time. Beating someone up is just a matter of ordering one of your cronies to do such and such against this person. The cutscene is the exact same each time, and after awhile, it just gets boring and you stop watching it. There really isn't any interaction at that level.

Evil Genius looks a lot better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Elixir's next game, Evil Genius, uses the same engine to much better effect, and looks pretty cool in a '60s spy movie pastiche type way.

Hate the 3ngine

[Txiasaeia]

If it weren't for the completely useless 3d engine, Republic would be *awesome*. The concept is great, but the 3ngine just slows down the game and makes it much more difficult than it really needed to be.

I dunno whether it needed to be a boardgame, but certainly less graphics. The game isn't a FPS!

I got Republic yesterday.

[MightyTribble]

Here's some initial thoughts:

The 3D city is very pretty, and very impressive. It's also completely unnecessary. Republic is a board game, and all the 3D city does is add some 'color' to proceedings. A well-designed 2D board and cut-scenes would be more than sufficient.

The UI is pretty bad. Buttons aren't intuitively depicted, and widgets are small and finnicky. For a game with a 3D map, it's annoying to be unable to re-size or move control widgets. It'd also be nice to be able to zoom in on the 2D city view.

It's a turn-based game that desperately wants to be an RTS. You can't pause the game to give orders, and time is always ticking (you have 4 minutes to do a turn - not much time to consider strategy and responses, really). However, once you have a few turn's worth of actions planned out, you can't just 'skip to the end of the turn'. Some actions (like recruiting, rallies, etc) require you to sit through 30 secs to several minute's worth of "Sim Theatre" before you get to perform a tweak (like run a conversation or sway a crowd at a rally). This is amusing the first few times, annoying after that.

The 'tutorial' sucks. Really, really bad. It's not really a tutorial - just a couple of screens crammed with information about the UI. Clearly tacked on just before going gold.

The mechanics of the game appear solid (Ideaologies are essentially a version of 'rock paper scissors', with tweaks) and fun (see, I told you it was like a board game. Ever played Junta? It's like a more serious version of that). Strip away the crappy UI and uneccesary 3D, and there's the makings of a good game here. It seems the developers either over-reached, or wanted to appeal to the GTA crowd to tap into the mythical million unit sales.

Final gripe - it's both fast and slow. Your beginning characters can only perform one or two actions, and you have to play for a while before they start to get anything interesting. It'd be nice if you could get more thuggish with your opponents earlier - I'd just like to be able to get someone to break some legs from day one.

I'll probably have some more to say once I've played it a bit more, but at the moment the jury's still out - it's either flawed genius or crap dusty with golden sparklies. I don't know which yet.

Re:I got Republic yesterday.

[fm6]

The 3D city is very pretty, and very impressive. It's also completely unnecessary. Republic is a board game, and all the 3D city does is add some 'color' to proceedings. A well-designed 2D board and cut-scenes would be more than sufficient.

Sufficient for making a playable game, perhaps, but not sufficient for a sellable one. Leave out the cool 3d graphics and nobody'd buy it. OK, maybe gamers are smarter than that, but the people who put up the development money definitely aren't.

It's a turn-based game that desperately wants to be an RTS. You can't pause the game to give orders, and time is always ticking (you have 4 minutes to do a turn - not much time to consider strategy and responses, really).

Unfortunately, this seems to be all the rage right now. I was never able to get really good at Age of Empires because I just can't think fast enough. I guess the idea is to keep the game from getting too cerebral.

Re:I got Republic yesterday.

[MightyTribble]

Sufficient for making a playable game, perhaps, but not sufficient for a sellable one. Leave out the cool 3d graphics and nobody'd buy it. OK, maybe gamers are smarter than that, but the people who put up the development money definitely aren't.

That's pretty much what I figured. Have you seen the requirements, though? They recommend 512MB RAM and a 128MB graphics card. For a game that's *basically* a board game, it's got the requirements of a very butch MMORPG or FPS. They're cutting off a large chunk of their audience just by having such extreme requirements.

Re:I got Republic yesterday.

[fm6]

Hey dude, what universe do you live in? The one I live in is all about appearance. You take the VW Rabbit, you give it a new body that makes it look like a cartoon of the old VW Beetle, and you've changed a car nobody wants to a car they can't make fast enough -- without actually changing the car. Everything is appearance. You need it to sell, and you especially need it to get the money you need to develop a high-tech item.

You might respond that this results in a lot of products that are all appearance and no substance. So what else is new?

Tropico

[Decaffeinated Jedi]

When it comes to political simulations, it just doesn't get much better than PopTop Software's Tropico--a game with all the simplicity of SimCity with significantly more depth and a far better sense of humor.

DecafJedi

Re:Tropico

[Prior Restraint]

If you're red-green color-blind, though, it sucks pretty hard.

Re:Tropico

[moonbender]

I guess you're not entirely wrong, I certainly haven't seen a better political simulation in the past few years - and that's really sad because while a great, fun game, as a political simulation Tropico is pathetic. Of course, it's meant to be tongue in cheek and not as a serious political sim, so I guess that's all right. Comparing it to SimCity is rather ridiculous, too - they are totally different games in mostly every way. Personally, I'd certainly argue that SimCity, all incarnations, is a more serious political simulation (if you insist on calling it that).

Re:Tropico

[iMMersE]

Surprisingly, this is quite an important statement - About 10% of white males are red-green colourblind, with slightly lower percentages in other ethnic groups (and much lower occurances in females.)

So please, give us a break, and stay away from red/green colour schemes as you might be automatically losing 10% of potential viewers before you start.

Re:Tropico

[Telastyn]

Umm... no. Tropico is as much a political simulation as Monopoly is a hotel construction simulation. Sure theres symbolism there, but from a gameplay perspective it's very minor compared to y'know actual gameplay.

Tropico plays alot more like Roller Coaster Tycoon, or Dungeon Keeper. The kind of build stuff and keep people happy games.

Re:Simple

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

-1 Troll?

It's a joke son, laugh.

Republic: A Board Game Held Hostage by GTA

[superultra]

There's a vision buried just beneath the surface of Republic, one that indeed needed a freeform GTA-esque engine. I think that what happened is they built up the engine and then realized that they couldn't accomplish everything they would've liked, so instead used it but scaled back everything into a much more linear campaign mode.

That said, players of Republic will spend the majority of their time in the top boardgame view anyway. Here's some older but wiser games that I think Republic could have outperformed or equaled, but due to the oppresive capatalist shackles of the 3d engine, just can't quite do so.

Hidden Agenda is slightly more educational in nature and Hispanic/Latin in surrounding, but offers high replaying value due to the various idealogies. Shadow President is globally based and fundamentally differs from Republic in that instead of throwing a coup against a small dictator, you are the largest dictator in the world: President of the United States! Still, the political feel of the game is the same, even if you're on the other side of the coup (which is, admittedly, more fun in this case). And who can forget Chris Crawford's classic Balance of Power? The guys who made Republic, apparently.

Any I'm forgetting? (Tropico was already mentioned)

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if your shitty joke was funny it would've been modded up, you fucking idiot.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Here I was thinking "troll" had an actual meaning, instead of being a catchall term for posts you don't like. Learn something every day.

dead horse

[Anonymous Coward]

Was that supposed to be another joke?

Please identify any further jokes you try to include. THose of us with a sense of humor are easily fooled when faced with a pale imitation.

Lacking one important detail...

[Orne]

Like Revolution, Evil Genius is not multiplayer. Too bad, it seems to have an interesting premise (like Dungeon Keeper), but I like having a human to compete against.