Review Machine:Athlon XP 2800+1024MB RAM128MB ATI RADEON 9700 PRO

Republic: The Revolution is the long awaited political-strategy game from Elixer Studios. Merging elements from several genres, including real-time strategy and management sim, Republic has mixed results in satisfying the expectations that it has picked up during its five years of development.

Republic takes place in the fictional country of Novistrana, a plausible former Soviet Republic. Following the collapse of the USSR, Novistrana becomes a dictatorship under the command of President Karasov. The citizens soon become angry with Mr. Karasov, and it's up to you to convert them to overthrow the existing government and replace it with your political party.

This proves more difficult than it sounds, because early in the game President Karasov outlaws all rival political parties. Now you have to battle the government, the military, and the other political parties struggling to overthrow the dictator.

Like most strategy games, Republic allows you to pick and customize what kind of player you're going to be. After picking a name and symbol for your party, you answer a series of moral questions that determine what kind of ideology your party is going to believe in- Force, Influence, or Wealth. Being the forceful kind of guy that I am, my choice was obvious.

I've got to admit, the start of the game was extremely difficult for me, even at the easiest setting. It wasn't that the game itself is difficult; the challenge came from the unfortunately horrible manual and tutorial. Even the GUI is extremely cryptic, and definitely not friendly to beginners.

Needless to say, the game has a tough learning curve. Luckily for me, I decided to buy the official Prima strategy guide the same day. I found the Guide an invaluable tool for getting started, explaining many of the things the manual left out.

The first thing you might notice when you see this game, is that it has some incredibly high system requirements, the most noticeable being 512 MB of RAM. That's right, a minimum of 512. As in, Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 put together. Not only that, but the game experienced extreme slowdown at some points on the computer I was using (see top). Of course, I had the settings maxed out at 1152 x 864, but with no AA or AF, there's no excuse for it. This seems to me like an unfortunately common side effect of a long development time; let's hope it doesn't hamper sales.

As far as the game goes, there are three gigantic cities, all divided into different districts and ideologies. Red districts are more responsive to the "Force" ideology, Yellow districts for "Wealth," and Blue districts for "Influence."

The long term object of the game is to win popular support for your faction, and you can do with by running "Actions" in the different districts. The actions can range from rallies and graffiti to increase support, to vandalism and riots, for decreasing the support of opposition parties. You'll find that you use the "Decrease Support actions" just as much as the Increase support actions in your quest for dominance, because the game only allows you to convert undecided "Proles"- that is, you can't convert people if they already belong to a different party.

Actions are, in essence, what Republic is all about. Actions are the different means of which you try to take control of the city. Actions do have other purposes than increasing and decreasing support, of course. The other actions include ways of strengthening the loyalty of your fellow party-mates, corrupting the members of other parties, increasing the "security" of a district, beating opposition members unconscious, and my personal favorite: "Eliminating Characters."

Although the Eliminate Character actions appear much later in the game, they are the premier way of taking out the competition. The game seems to recommend them as a last resort, however, because they aren't without their faults. If the Press catches wind that the "DethKon's bi4tches" political party is assassinating people, other factions could use it against you (the game refers to this as "leaving sleaze" or "leaving traces"). Of course, my solution to that is sending my special-forces team to "eliminate" the reporter.

Actions are carried out by the different members of your party. You can get a maximum of five members at one time (including yourself) to run around different parts of the city and do the actions you assign to them. There are two primary ways of getting members: You can "recruit" unaligned characters or steal members from other parties. To get rid of members, you can fire (or "sack") members from your party at any time, but once you sack somebody, you can't get him back.

The characters themselves are one of the three different ideologies. The type of action's they have are chosen solely by what ideology there are. The three ideologies have different actions, but the basic idea of each one is the same. For example, all ideologies have "eliminate character" actions: Force ideology has "Alpha-squad," a special-forces unit to take out opponents. Wealth ideology lets you hire a hitman, to assassinate people. Influence ideology has Exile, which simply banishes the character from the game. They all have the same effect in the end- they just go through different methods to achieve it.

Effectiveness of each action depends on the ideology of the action versus the ideology of the district that it is performed in. It's a sort of "rock, paper, scissors" type system, where Wealth type actions have greatest effect in Force (red) districts, Force having a bonus in Influence districts, and Influence having a bonus in Wealth districts.

The game does feature a day/night cycle. The day's are divided into 3 times of day (or "shifts"): Morning, Afternoon, and Night. You can only run one action per time of day (which actually takes 4 minutes), effectively limiting you to 3 actions per day. Unfortunately, the fact that all of your characters need to sleep for one shift a day, you have to schedule your characters sleep patterns for best results.

This is where some of the problems in the game start to surface. The game really doesn't offer enough control and interaction over the character's actions to keep it from being tedious. The most involvement you'll ever have in your characters actions happens during the conversation scenes, and they are really more frustrating than fun. It's my opinion that the fun in this game comes from playing it more like a RTS than a sim, and not to expect much involving gameplay when it comes down to micromanagement.

The missions are very linear, save for a couple paths you can choose throughout the game. For each mission, objectives are laid out meticulously, along with directions for completing them. There really isn't much thinking needed to complete an objective; they're all very much straightforward.

Republic: The Revolution has some really good looking 3-D graphics. Unfortunately, you don't get to see them nearly as much as you should. Much of the game takes place in the 2-D, top down "satellite" view. This is probably the most useful position for most of the game, because it makes it easy to manage and monitor several districts at once. From the satellite view, you can assign your members actions without actually having to watch them do it. The satellite view also offers pie charts to show how much support you have in each district.

If you want to actually look at the city, you can use the Rooftop view. This lets you scroll around from a slightly angled top-down position, and examine some of the environment.

The closest view is the "Action-view." In this view, as the name suggests, the camera actually zooms in to the specified character, so you can watch him perform his action. Although entertaining, there are only a few situations in the game where you actually need to use it: when your member has to have a conversation with another character. You need to have a conversation every time you try to recruit somebody, lliason somebody, or debate somebody.

The last view is the Faction Screen. This view is pretty much useless for managing the city, it allows you to manage the internal workings of your party. It lets you view the stats of your members, information about your faction, and it allows you to sack your members.

The 3-D environment is very well constructed. Although the city itself is fake, the layout and design of the buildings are very accurate for a former Soviet republic. Not that I've ever been to one...

It's truly a shame that the cityscape that was so excellently crafted plays such a minor role in the game.

The soundwork in Republic: The Revolution deserves some recognition. A genuinely original classical soundtrack adds to the dull, murky mood of the game.

Voice acting is also done very well. The characters speak a made-up language (at least, I assume it's not a real language) that I like to call Novistran-eese.

Novistraneese is accurate in the sense that it sounds closely related to many of the real east-european languages. The tone and volume of voice goes up and down during a conversation, to give at least a basic idea of what's going on.

All together, Republic: The Revolution's good points are barely enough to cover up the tedious and frustrating aspects of the gameplay. It's a generally pleasing experience the first time around, although it is a let-down from all the hype that it has obtained for the past few years.

Republic is a very challenging game, and is probably not for everyone. If you're the kind of person who is looking for light, straightforward gameplay, you will walk away frustrated and dissapointed. Even if you're willing to spend the effort and learn the moronic, asinine interface, the 4 difficulty options are little motivation to play through the game again.