Amaurote
09-05-04, 12:19PM
http://www.gamingbliss.com/games/unsorted/republic.jpg
Okay, so after a few misgivings, I bought Republic: the Revolution on the advice of echs over at FS, and I've been playing it compulsively over the two days. The criticisms about its interface are accurate (the graphics are beautiful, but you spent three-quarters of your time on a 2000 AD-style boardmap of the particular city in which you're currently based), but on the whole you adapt pretty quickly to it. Quite a few people have said that it's slow, which is very true - for the first hour, after which your characters develop more skills, diversify and the enemy starts striking back.
The idea is apparently based on Canetti's Crowds and Power, which won the Nobel prize a few years ago: it's a slightly cynical political simulator in which the central political factors are Influence, Wealth and Force, and factions are created and consolidated - or shattered and broken - on the basis of these attributes. You answer a depth-based questionnaire on your political background (not unlike political compass, but with a role-play element based on the fact that your Novistranian character has grown up in a corrupt police state, and responding to that context rather than your own), and then the game generates your character's attributes - and decides whether your faction will be Force-, Wealth-, or Influence-based - in response. However, your own decisions will ultimately reflect the nature of your movement, and a violent Wealth-based faction will eventually become a Force gang.
You then recruit a revolutionary cell and begin fomenting discord in the city. Your skills grow and deepen as you progress, and your faction changes as you sack or lose existing members, or as other factions interfere with them. Your initial problem is countering the activities of other factions, although you can also liaise with them for temporary advantage; the game gets progressively more violent as these factions, too, develop skills. There is a central narrative and a series of objectives, but your own options are endless: you can concentrate on recruiting journalists, priests and celebrities and using leaflets, rallies, poster campaigns and canvassing to communicate to your masses, or you can recruit thugs and corrupt policemen to blackmail, bribe, assault and ultimately assassinate your enemies, in addition to moving your HQ, changing shifts and hiding characters to elude police detection. In other words, you can be as moral or as immoral as you choose to be - you can be a shell-suited Lenin, a glib opportunist, a man on the make, or a Nazi. The city itself is absorbing: there's a kitsch 1980s aspect about the characters, who look like the civilians in Hitman 2, but the buildings are wonderfully rendered.
I have very little time for video games, but as political simulators go, I think this is fantastic. Old man's game, mind: think The Sims meets Dictator.
http://www.valcenter.ch/images/grandes/fer_republic.jpg
Okay, so after a few misgivings, I bought Republic: the Revolution on the advice of echs over at FS, and I've been playing it compulsively over the two days. The criticisms about its interface are accurate (the graphics are beautiful, but you spent three-quarters of your time on a 2000 AD-style boardmap of the particular city in which you're currently based), but on the whole you adapt pretty quickly to it. Quite a few people have said that it's slow, which is very true - for the first hour, after which your characters develop more skills, diversify and the enemy starts striking back.
The idea is apparently based on Canetti's Crowds and Power, which won the Nobel prize a few years ago: it's a slightly cynical political simulator in which the central political factors are Influence, Wealth and Force, and factions are created and consolidated - or shattered and broken - on the basis of these attributes. You answer a depth-based questionnaire on your political background (not unlike political compass, but with a role-play element based on the fact that your Novistranian character has grown up in a corrupt police state, and responding to that context rather than your own), and then the game generates your character's attributes - and decides whether your faction will be Force-, Wealth-, or Influence-based - in response. However, your own decisions will ultimately reflect the nature of your movement, and a violent Wealth-based faction will eventually become a Force gang.
You then recruit a revolutionary cell and begin fomenting discord in the city. Your skills grow and deepen as you progress, and your faction changes as you sack or lose existing members, or as other factions interfere with them. Your initial problem is countering the activities of other factions, although you can also liaise with them for temporary advantage; the game gets progressively more violent as these factions, too, develop skills. There is a central narrative and a series of objectives, but your own options are endless: you can concentrate on recruiting journalists, priests and celebrities and using leaflets, rallies, poster campaigns and canvassing to communicate to your masses, or you can recruit thugs and corrupt policemen to blackmail, bribe, assault and ultimately assassinate your enemies, in addition to moving your HQ, changing shifts and hiding characters to elude police detection. In other words, you can be as moral or as immoral as you choose to be - you can be a shell-suited Lenin, a glib opportunist, a man on the make, or a Nazi. The city itself is absorbing: there's a kitsch 1980s aspect about the characters, who look like the civilians in Hitman 2, but the buildings are wonderfully rendered.
I have very little time for video games, but as political simulators go, I think this is fantastic. Old man's game, mind: think The Sims meets Dictator.
http://www.valcenter.ch/images/grandes/fer_republic.jpg