Games That Should Have Been Great: "Republic: The Revolution"

So, for what feels like about the 20th time, I reinstalled the old strategy game "Republic: The Revolution" again.

The game is...unique. Set in a fictional ex-Soviet Union splinter state named Novistrana, it allows you to lead a political revolution against a corrupt, dictatorial government.

There are 3 central Ideologies: Influence, Wealth and Force. Depending on the route your party follows, you will acquire new members with different views and form a different type of government over time.

For example - a typical Influence party will primarily use traditional rallies and canvassing to gain support, while a Force based party will perhaps use crime or intimidation to further it's agenda. A Wealthy party will seek to sway minds with flashy ad campaigns and use financial ruin to attack other parties.

It's all very odd and interesting. Unfortunately, that's where Republic starts to fall flat.

It's crammed to the brim with interesting ideas and mechanics, but the gameplay is nothing short of infuriating at times.

Take the way your party progresses: You will take out a "support increasing" action, such as a poster campaign, to increase your support in a city district. However, you can only win support from neutral Proletarians who don't support any party.

This means you have to damage opposition support before you can harvest it for yourself.

This leads to seemingly infinite "Damage Support" actions followed by "Increase Support" actions. Of course, opposing parties are doing this all the time too.

You end up winning one district, then immediately losing the one you held before. As a result, it sometimes feels bloody impossible to actually sway anyone for more than 5 seconds.

Another highly annoying design failure is that you cannot see what your party members can eventually unlock as they level. This means that you'll spend hours meticulously levelling up a guy to find that he is rubbish.

I have a "Political Activist" as one of my party members. At about Level 10, he only has 3 very mundane Influence actions. He can't even damage hostile party support. This essentially means that I have spent several hours in-game using him to unlock useful abilities he doesn't have. To get a useful party member, I have to fire him and hire someone else, meaning all my effort was totally wasted. Very, very annoying.

By contrast, you sometimes get an "uber member" who seems to be able to do everything. This is also useless. Since you need to order your political members to be working together every day (one weakens support, for example, then the other gains you support right after), having one guy able to inexplicably do loads of different stuff is actually counter-intuitive.

The objectives are also frequently ridiculous. My current goal is to "Attain 60% support in 4 areas around the Church District."

I have three methods of gaining support at present - Canvassing, Poster Campaigns and Graffiti. Both Graffiti and Canvassing create Sleaze, which basically means other parties can print it in the paper (they almost inevitably discover your actions), then you get all your support utterly destroyed in that region.

So even my "gain support" actions lose their support about 1 day later. Excellent! Now, I have majority support in all those regions, but that counts for jack. I need exactly 60%.

The local Socialist Union party (AKA the Commies) are a bunch of criminal arsehats, and will vandalise the utter shit out of my territory the minute I convince some of their proles to support me. In return, I must consolidate my support by launching graffii campaigns in their territory and reporting their acts to the papers.

This results in an endless back and forth in the papers of "OMG, COMMIES USING VIOLENCE" followed by "OMG, OTHER GUYS USING GRAFFITI".

As a result, the objective is mind-numbingly annoying to achieve. In addition to all the above, there is some kind of retarded player handicap in effect, or so it seems. Whenever you really start to take some territory, you'll suddenly find all the other parties gang up over one evening to totally rape your support base with a sudden all-out attack of graffiti, vandalism, crime waves and leaflet campaigns.

It sure is fun to work for about 2 hours and then lose it all instantly!

Now, supposedly you can counter this. A dickhead working for the local hoods keeps organising attacks on your supporters? Use your Business contact to drop a massive debt on his head, then laugh as he deserts his party and lives a poor life of ruin.

Supposedly. In actuality, the Weaken Character attacks are piss weak, and you have to perform them about 5 times to get a guy to leave his party. Then they just hire someone else >_> <_<

Of course, while you're ruining his day your guy is also unable to be supporting you with poster campaigns and the like too, meaning other parties will quite happily destroy your own support anyway. Everything requires way too much micromanagement - why should the player be punished merely for knocking on the doors of some proles? It's simply not feasible to constantly keep your actions secret, especially when only one of your 3 guys has that action available.

The end result feels like a game that could have been fantastic (interesting concept, a story that feels fresh and intriguing, an environment that is large and very ambitious) but is really let down by some stupid design choices.