Posted August 14, 2009
Republic is a rare modern political simulator, inspired in the russian communist revolution. A game of ups and downs really: it carries a great deal of personality and uniqueness, but suffers from a less-than-intuitive interface and perhaps a failure to fulfill their original vision of what the game would actually be.
As the fictitious country of Novistrana sinks into a political crisis, you and other young faction leaders step in to try and take over. You arm-wrestle other factions in the fields of popular support, resource management, knowledge, muscle-recruiting and so on, all with a strrrrong rrrrussian accent. All "political" actions either use money, influence or violence, so yeah, it's a communist revolution alright. :) The point is, you can achieve the same using any of these three "resources", it depends on your people abilities.
The game is quite hard to master. Controls are all over the place, it has too many help screens, and even the help is confusing to me. It begs for a proper tutorial... but it's far from unplayable, it just takes time.
I think the main problem of the game is what it fails to fulfill. At first it feels like you'll be navigating through the great 3D town you're in, walking through its streets and living its life, but you and your comrades end up hostage of the boardgame-like map. You have little freedom of movement in 3D view, and it would be pointless anyway, because it's a bit hard to find your way around. Republic is turn based but with a timer, so you don't have much time for that, you mostly rush through action after action.
Perhaps even more importantly, designing a town that looks like the Moscow of movies and adding the russian accent just isn't enough to make this a russian revolution game. This is disappointing because it's a fairly unique game already, and it could have been so much better. It ends up feeling like yet another strategy simulation, and a fairly simple one, the atmosphere falling short of realizing its expectations.
Three stars still means it's very buyable and playable (I used to play it in a friend's computer back in the days and I'm really considering getting it here to play more), but it's certainly not for everyone like many other games -- getting a demo first might help you make up your mind.
As the fictitious country of Novistrana sinks into a political crisis, you and other young faction leaders step in to try and take over. You arm-wrestle other factions in the fields of popular support, resource management, knowledge, muscle-recruiting and so on, all with a strrrrong rrrrussian accent. All "political" actions either use money, influence or violence, so yeah, it's a communist revolution alright. :) The point is, you can achieve the same using any of these three "resources", it depends on your people abilities.
The game is quite hard to master. Controls are all over the place, it has too many help screens, and even the help is confusing to me. It begs for a proper tutorial... but it's far from unplayable, it just takes time.
I think the main problem of the game is what it fails to fulfill. At first it feels like you'll be navigating through the great 3D town you're in, walking through its streets and living its life, but you and your comrades end up hostage of the boardgame-like map. You have little freedom of movement in 3D view, and it would be pointless anyway, because it's a bit hard to find your way around. Republic is turn based but with a timer, so you don't have much time for that, you mostly rush through action after action.
Perhaps even more importantly, designing a town that looks like the Moscow of movies and adding the russian accent just isn't enough to make this a russian revolution game. This is disappointing because it's a fairly unique game already, and it could have been so much better. It ends up feeling like yet another strategy simulation, and a fairly simple one, the atmosphere falling short of realizing its expectations.
Three stars still means it's very buyable and playable (I used to play it in a friend's computer back in the days and I'm really considering getting it here to play more), but it's certainly not for everyone like many other games -- getting a demo first might help you make up your mind.