The Revolution Will Be Televised

The Soviet Union has collapsed, and the man who murdered your parents, Vasily Karasov, has risen from his position as head of the Secret Police to claim power in the tumultuous province of Novistrana. You've lived your life both with ambitions of political power and a burning desire to see Karasov toppled.  The connections you've made in your youth coupled with your newly formed political ideology have put you into position to make a power grab in the wake of the Soviet collapse.  But, you're not alone in your ambition.  As competing players on the political scene wage the battle for hearts and minds across the province, and the established but unsteady government headed by Karasov strong arms you and your fellow dissidents, you find many obstacles in your path.  Will you lead the people to political freedom, or rule them with an iron fist?  Will you turn your enemies to your own cause, or turn their own supporters against them?  Will you stand at the podium and turn the minds of the people with persuasion, or will you come to their door in the middle of the night and grip their hearts with fear?   In Republic, the decision is yours.

I had two distinct first impressions of Republic that can be best summarized in these comments: 1) I've never played anything like Republic before, and 2) What the hell am I supposed to be doing?  You're welcome to try and find a previous game that Republic emulates, and if you come up with one be sure and let me know.  As far as I can tell, Republic may be one of the most original PC games to hit my hard drive in longer than I care to remember.  Part The Sims, part GTA, part Mafia, and part turn based strategy game, with a dash of just about everything else thrown in for good measure, Republic's greatest salvation and its most daunting hurdle is its apparent originality. 

Thus, one would certainly hope, that such an unfamiliar game would ease you into the process with deep instructions and a detailed tutorial.  Republic has neither.  Much like the game itself, the instructions feel at first like a hodgepodge of seemingly unrelated information with no strong thread to tie the point of the game together.  The tutorial is worse.  Much worse.  Barely more than a powerpoint slideshow, the tutorial tells you basically what the interface displays without giving you any real indication how that interface affects the game itself.  To say that Republic begins with a steep learning curve may be a drastic understatement, ultimately boiling down to a few hours of trial and error coupled with regular referencing to the cryptic instruction book to put the practice and the theory together into a coherent idea of what you're supposed to be doing.  It's a slow process, but eventually you get there.

And once you do, things improve.  A lot.

Ultimately Republic has a surprisingly basic gameplay model.  Essentially each day is broken into three rounds - morning, afternoon, night - and during those rounds you give orders to your henchmen.  The orders your political minions can perform are a function of their personal ideology and their level.  Now, here's where it starts to get confusing, because in Republic ideology is everything.  Each character has his own ideology, your cause has its own, and each city region has its own.  Worse still, each action you perform even has its own 'ideology' (and the quicker you learn how they overuse and abuse that word, the easier time you'll have wrapping your brain around the concept).  Basically ideology is used in the game as a comparative tool, so when performing an action on a given district the difference between the two ideologies becomes the measuring stick for success.  When performing friendly actions (recruiting, gathering support, etc.) similar ideologies will be most effective, for example buying political support in a part of town where money is important will be more effective than trying to persuade with talk of solidarity.  Conversely, when performing unfriendly actions (weakening an opponent, attacking) different ideologies will be most effective, for example in that same financial district of town a good bit of vandalism will have a more dramatic effect than your run of the mill bribery.  Confused?  Welcome to the club.

So, as I was saying the game does have a surprisingly basic gameplay model in that each day is broken up into those three rounds, and each character under your command can perform one action per each round.  At its most basic form Republic is a strategy game where you must seek to gather support for your cause while subverting the support of your enemies.  The methods by which you do this, and the mind bending interdependencies of the ideology rules are both vast and complex, but the basic actions you take are surprisingly simple. 

The game also has roleplaying elements as your character and henchmen slowly level up and become increasingly effective at their specialties.  With each level you give points to various characteristics of your character, increasing stats such as Status, Charisma, and Control among others.  Additionally you can give them new actions to perform - actions that tend to match their personal ideology, thus public speakers aren't going to bash a lot of car windows - or enhance the actions they already perform. 

And that, my friends, is just scratching the surface of how to play Republic.  I've not even mentioned how your support in a given district becomes Force, Influence, or Wealth resources, or how actions use up those resources.  Nor have I mentioned how information gathered on districts gives you an advantage of performing in Secrecy, or how that secrecy influences how opposing factions react to you.  Nor have I mentioned how individual actions can also be 'tweaked' to specialize for the region, so your billboard campaign can stress solidarity in zones most swayed by force, or how you can spread lies through an enemy faction's support base.  I haven't even told you about how or why you allocate points into the conversation system when directly influencing individuals.  And I haven't done this because in many ways I'm not entirely clear on the nuances myself, and I've been at this for a good number of hours.

At this point, you may be wondering why anyone would want to play Republic, why all that unfamiliar complexity might be worth while, and the answer is simple.  When you know what you're doing, and you can enjoy that complexity and see it as depth of gameplay, Republic has moments of absolute brilliance.  Let me be anecdotal on that.  I had as one of my characters a rather persuasive priest who was sent to a region controlled by a rather troublesome enemy faction, The Union of Socialist Workers.  His task was to expose some of my enemy's unsavory actions, and he arrived in a train yard under a darkening sky and stood on a small pedastal and began preaching for my People's Liberation Front.  I watched all this in a cinematic mode that you'll spend plenty of time enjoying, and as the camera swept slowly around his preaching form, his cyrillic sounding nonsense crescendoing as people gathered to listen, a slow drizzle fell.  He spread out his arms as the camera panned up, and behind him the people's numbers increased.  They began to cheer.  With hands spread wide above him, his voice rising high, the well placed music swelling as the audience rallied to my cause, the game sent chills down my spine and I giggled in a way best termed malevolently.  Support in the region plummeted for my enemy, and lost support means lost resources for him, and more minds for me to turn.  It was at once both a game, and an experience.

This game has moments, beautiful moments that make all the work you've put in well worth while.  Those moments can be spread out behind a lethargic gamepace, but instead of seeming boring that pace simply leaves you that much more likely to lose track of time.  I've already been surprised on several occasions at how quickly the clock turned as I played.  Republic may be one of those games that leave you startlyed at just how swiftly three in the morning can come.

That is, if you have the system to handle it.

Make no mistake about it.  Republic is a resource hog.  It chews your RAM up and spits it out while asking for more.  With traumatically long load times measuring upwards of two minutes, Republic is dying for optimization.  And don't make the mistake of leaving any background programs running while playing unless you just want to punish your system.  While the framerate on my system does not seem to suffer as long as I follow Republic's wishes to the letter, even simple programs will cause an exponentially steep decline in performance if left running. 

Which is a bit surprising as Republic's visuals are nicely adequate but not earth shattering by any means.  The visuals tend to remind me of Mafia with its similarly dynamic world.  While you can either move freely about from a rooftop view, focus your camera close on an individual person or location, or drop to a free floating, but vertically limited, first person view, you don't actually have complete control of the camera.  This doesn't prove to be much of a problem as it leaves the camera controls thankfully simple - you'll have enough to worry about - with plenty of options to get a satisfying perspective. 

And that world you're thrust into runs independently in real time a la games like Grand Theft Auto.  Cars wander throughout the city on their own business, and people populate the sidewalks, cafes, and stores.  Clicking on people gives you the option of seeing what's on their mind, if they have the time to stop and chat, and clicking on individual buildings gives you some basic information about the location and if it could be useful to your cause.  From your godlike perspective you can either keep tabs on how your characters are doing in their assigned tasks, keep an eye on your enemies, or peruse the city on your own.  Additionally there is a satellite perspective that provides the most information on who controls what region, where your enemies are acting - assuming you have the knowledge to pierce their veil of secrecy - and how each region is affected ideologically.

So what, you may ask, are my first impressions of Republic.  If I've left you confused, I apologize, but it's a sensation you best get used to if you expect to play.  Republic is a daunting game that is both wonderfully original and frustratingly counter-intuitive.  It thrusts you into a world of political conflict without the resources at first necessary to know how to be effective, forces you into hours of trial and error, and then when you're just to the point of becoming irritated, does something that will blow your mind and leave you feeling inspired and refreshed.  It is a difficult but welcome breath of fresh air, a game with moments of brilliance that leave you with a sense of power as you force or persuade your ideology into the minds of the citizens of Novistrana.  As the game itself slowly exposes itself to you, and instead of complexity you begin to see depth, it becomes easier to immerse yourself in the world, or even drown yourself in the politcal conflict.  My first impression, then, is this: Republic - The Revolution demands and then rewards patience.

- Elysium