Republic: The Revolution

George Soropos tries his hand at winning over the masses.

With bean counters reigning supreme in game publisher’s boardrooms everywhere, new ideas don’t see the light of day very often any more. Republic: The Revolution looked like being one of these rare birds, a fresh original concept and something for PC gamers to cheer about. Demis Hassabis, teen world chess champ and designer of ‘Theme Park’ came up with the idea for Republic quite a long time ago and has been working on the project for about four years. However in the end it looks as though Eidos executives got to it, and what we have left is a watered-down version of the developer’s original concept that more closely resembles Eidos’ earlier ‘Gangsters’ games than it does any kind of ‘new’ idea.

The premise of the game places you in charge of a small dissident faction trying to take control of a tiny former soviet republic called Novistrana. Your main character has a range of abilities depending on your preferences and his experience level, and you can recruit others to your cause to add new skills to your repertoire. These include passive abilities such as investigation and surveying to gauge the mood of the people and find out what other factions are up to. There are also more aggressive skills such as charming, bribing and assaulting other characters around town.

The hype surrounding the game has boasted about its ‘Totality’ engine which has the capability of rendering an infinite number of polygons to create a very realistic game world. The 3D part of the game does look very nice, even with a maximum resolution of only 1152 x 864, however it is basically just an event viewer. There is very little interactivity between you and the game when you are in the 3D mode, some political actions allow you to choose the type of message you want to give to the people in order to tailor it to their particular tastes and that’s about it. This probably explains why the engine can do what it does without slowing down too much.

If you have played either of Eidos’ (or should we say Atari’s) Gangster titles you will be familiar with how Republic works. All of the actual gameplay occurs on a 2D map of the city where you plan the actions of all your faction members up to three turns in advance.

Turns are basically the different times of the day, morning, afternoon and night, and flow without pause. While the game goes on other factions will vie for the sympathies of the people and you have to approach the right ones with the right message to win them over.

The game throws specific goals at you to keep you going in the right direction and there are usually a few different ways to go about achieving them. As your characters succeed in their actions they go up levels. Planning what skills to improve when your fellow conspirators do this also determines a lot of what you can do with them later. This abstract way of influencing gameplay is another uninspiring aspect of the game’s design.

Even the ‘Gangsters’ titles gave you some direct control in the animated part of the game, letting you drive them around and shoot things up. Republic is a pure strategy game where you make your plans and watch what happens. You will spend virtually all your time working on the 2D map as even the most action oriented events in the 3D world eventually become too dull to bother watching, leaving the unanswered question ‘why did they bother with such a technically advanced 3D engine in the first place?’

This is not necessarily a bad thing, hard core strategy buffs probably won’t mind much, but for many the gameplay will quite likely be disappointing. After a few days’ organising, planning and scheming the game starts to slip into a monotony of routine which sadly seems more like work than fun. Even though there are over 200 different actions useable by your cohorts they all fall into two basic categories: gaining support or undermining your opponent’s support.

Republic: The Revolution was an idea with a lot of potential that seems to have been neutered in order to wrap its development to keep costs down. Whether that’s the developer’s fault for taking too long or the publisher’s fault for being too impatient we may never know, but a good idea has gone begging, and God knows there are few enough of them in the games business these days