Republique Review - Good concept poor execution.

By Sam Coles:

There is always something about episodic games that rub me the wrong way, it’s because there is never a reliable release schedule I’m looking at you Tell Tale games. When people ask me if I have played the latest episode of whatever is popular at the time I just say “I’m waiting for the disc that will come out and it will turn out cheaper” *cough* *cough* Hitman. Republique is another episodic game that came out in full recently on the PS4 which has a good concept, but has its annoyances.

Republique is set in an Orwellian future where everything is monitored it’s not a terribly original plot that we haven’t seen in video games before because we’ve been beating this plot in many forms to death. You play as yourself helping out a girl named Hope who wants to escape an institute where the residences are called “Pre-Cals” where they are born and raised in the institute as they monitor how she grows up etc.

When the gameplay starts it has a fixed camera angle similar to Resident Evil (the first three) as you have the perspective from the CCTV cameras which is interesting. You control the girl as well, but it’s a chore because the game decides to put tank controls in a stealth game which does not work because you leave one screen and enter the other and you end up walking back in the other direction. This is quite infuriating because you could end up walking back into the enemy who you’re running away from which resulted with me nearly biting my controller in half in frustration. The gameplay aspects I liked about this game was the CCTV perspective because you can leave girl where she is and scout a head and see what threats lie ahead or loot you can find to help upgrade your hacking abilities. Overall though the gameplay is extremely clunky in terms of controlling the girl because someone on the dev team has had a lobotomy and thought tank controls work with stealth games.

Graphically it’s okay, nothing special because sometimes it can look great with some of the lighting effects especially in the intro cutscene when the main character is talking to you with her phone. Other times the game can look very ugly with burly and bland textures coupled with lacklustre character models with poor animations which look right at home on a PS2.

Republique is a game I can’t recommend because it is more frustrating than good for me to carry on through the plot with its clunky controls and bad stealth elements. Give this one a miss.