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

[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

[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...

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.

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