Games that have suffered long delays in their are certainly nothing new to the industry. The track record of such titles however can often leave something to be desired. I'm sure you can easily list your own personal disappointments. The statements made by the developers of Republic: The Revolution though were laden with such hubris that it was almost inevitable that the finished product would never match up. Even so it comes as a great shock to find a game that seems ill thought out and with many aspects poorly implemented.

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The idea of taking the role of a politician leading a populist revolt is not exactly the stuff of boy hood dreams. Except when dealing with an army of robots. That is your task though in the fictional country of Novistrana, formed after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Those looking for a more personal tale to follow will be pleased to hear that by travelling along this path of power your character will have the chance to settle an old score with a Vasily Kasarov, an ex-secret police chief who was responsible for the disappearance of your parents.

After a brief introduction, one that is accompanied by a brilliant musical score, you must then answer ten questions. These ten questions define your starting characteristics but as these stats can be adjusted as you progress the outcome is of little consequence. Once completed you are then thrown into the game. Thrown is the right term indeed, you will be left to drown in a quagmire of icons and numbers. A tutorial is non-existent with the only help being a series of poorly annotated screen shots. I could certainly spot a few discernable interface elements, such as resources listed in the top left, but as to what I was meant to be actually doing I didn't have a clue. For the first time in I don't know how long, I had to swallow a bit of geek pride and give the game manual more than a cursory glance. It was a wasted effort and offered very little help, if any. What was strange though is that I managed to perform various actions in the game, but because the interface is so badly designed, with such little feedback given, I had no real idea as to what those actions were accomplishing. Indeed I had no idea if I was accomplishing anything at all. The addition of a clock also ensures you never have much time to absorb what's going on.

Take for example the conversation mini-game. It's a fairly simple card game. You allocate points to four cards and then play them like trumps against an opponent to win rounds. Each round is worth a different number of points, with the winner being the one with the highest score. When you first encounter this game though the bottom half of the screen is filled with a bunch of confusing numbers, you only have thirty seconds to distribute the points, with only five seconds for each round, and at the end of it you are swiftly booted from the scene.

For a game that introduces so many alien concepts the lack of a proper tutorial is inexcusable. It took me a good couple of hours before I understood what was going on. It is a painfully unwelcoming game.

Once things became clearer though I found the central game mechanics to be quite good. Your faction has to gain support from the various districts of the city. Each area will be a member of the three ideologies, namely force, and wealth. The more support in an area you have the more resources you earn at the beginning of each day. You can only convert neutral supporters to your faction, and naturally there are also competing factions operating within the city. The then entails either investigating for opportunities to convert neutral supporters or attack the support base of a specific faction and then convert them. If you are feeling particularly bold you can also attack a rival faction's leaders themselves.