République is pretty decent. (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Wednesday, March 23, 2016, 19:08 (3261 days ago) @ Kermit

It is very much a stealth game, but a fun one. You play the role of an outsider hacker who helps a girl named Hope sneak her way to freedom. You do this by jumping you point of view from camera to camera so you can see the movements of various guards and instruct Hope when and where to move next.

It was originally a mobile game, so the controls are very much based around single clicks or taps. But that's ok, because its solving the miniature puzzles of how to get from Point A to Point B without being seen that's the draw of the game, not shooting or hurrying. Along the way both you and Hope get access to a variety of gadgets and abilities to help her proceed. Hope can find things like TASERS or knockout gas to incapacity guards while you the hacker gain access to things like being able to lock a guard in a room for a time or being able to make a phone ring to draw guards out of position.

The game also has quite a bit of supplemental world building material built in. There's game cartridges or floppies you can pickpocket from the patrolling guards. There's all sorts of newspapers and notes to read. There's also a fair amount of audio content you can access that shed light on the story and the wider world. Answering machine records, subversive recordings, etc. One of the draws of the game, beyond the good stealth gameplay, is that the voice acting is actually pretty good and features a some well known talent.

There's also a pretty decent amount of Director Commentary type content spread around each of the episodes similar to how Valve integrated commentary to things like Portal. You click on a special symbol on a wall or floor and it kicks off voiced commentary that sometimes has development screenshots and the like.

My only real disappointments were that:

1. It has taken so long to be finished. The first episode came out at the end of 2013! Compare that to something like Life is Strange, another episodic game, which completed in under a year, and Republique feels like it has been in development forever with extremely long times between episodes. (Obviously, not much of a problem for someone starting off now)

2. The facility / nation you are helping Hope sneak out of is early on said to be underground and is governed by an Overseer. Although I knew I was wishing for far too much, I think Republique would have worked great as a Fallout tie-in. Kinda a silly thing to be disappointed over, it was never billed as a tie-in to anything, but it almost kinda works as sneaking out of a VaultTec vault! :p