Up the Republic!

Hello everyone, August looks to be a quiet month for me blog wise as deadlines are creeping up and I've been packing up my things to prepare for another move for my final year (hopefully)of study. However while I was packing up my DVDs I stumbled across an old copy of a game I used to spend hours on at a time when it first came out. And since it is one of only a handful of video games to deal with politics in a more substantial and intelligent then "there are Nazi's over there go make them dead!" or the more recent there are "Rusky Commies over there go make them dead!".

Republic the Revolution the game is set in a fictional Soviet Breakaway Republic called Novistrana which for some reason always reminded me a little of Moldova where they speak a Simesque gibberish language. In the aftermath of Soviet collapse a Karasov former spy master in the KGB has rising to power in the chaos and turns the nation into a quagmire of corruption and brutality with a crumbling economy.

The players task is to build a political party first in you home town and lead a mass uprising against Karasov in the capitol and become its new leader. How you do that is up to you and the political skills you acquire, you can do the mundane canvassing and petition signing or you can hire hitmen and seize rival faction supporters businesses. The political tools in this game are quite varied and the trick to success is to find which one will work best in the current conditions.

Unfortunately the game is severely lacking when it comes to ideology. You really don't have one, you can choose your party name and a logo from out of 4 options all of which are generic and vague. This I feel is quite a shame as they missed an opportunity for a scenario where you had to weigh up your principals and your most effective yet unscrupulous tactics, but well it was the first game of an independent developer so I guess you have to take what you can get.

For those who are curious about the East and the turbulent politics of the post Soviet Republics such give this game a look especially as it is now going for under a fiver.