République Remastered Review

République Remastered is a stealth-action episodic game that was originally released on iOS and Android by indie studio Camouflaj LLC. The game was crowdfunded through Kickstarter and Camouflaj recently fulfilled its promise of bringing it to PC/Mac; this version launched on Feb 25, 2015 through Steam and it’s basically a visually improved version of the mobile release along with a few gameplay tweaks.

 

République Remastered is centered around a female protagonist called Hope: at the beginning, you receive a video message from her stating that she is imprisoned in this totalitarian society and specifically in a facility called Metamorphosis. Your main objective throughout the game is to help her escape from it, although you won’t have full control of Hope as all you’re really doing is hacking into the CCTV surveillance cameras and clicking on the spot you want her to go to. Still, Hope won’t always obey you if, for instance, there are a couple of guards standing near the point you want her to go to. Hope isn’t really a big fan of violence either, so if she encounters a guard, she won’t strike him to death: she’ll just disarm the guy and use his own taser against him.

Guiding Hope through the facility is done through a special feature called “OMNI View” software, which pauses the game and lets you choose which camera you want to use to plan your path. Of course, controlling the OMNI view is much easier on PC than it was on mobile. Now that we mentioned it, let’s get a bit in-depth in the controls scheme of République Remastered on PC. The OMNI View is upgrade-able by trading intel with an anonymous person titled “Data Broker”. Upgrades vary from strategical ones that can help you in escaping to  others such as the ability to read Prizrak and the facility’s managers email,  or even listen to answerphone messages.

 

Porting the game from mobile to PC meant that the controls had to be remade accordingly. Whoever played the game on mobile will feel right at home though, as the developers were careful with this transition.

Despite what could be expected with the game’s premise, République Remastered never felt repetitive as there are several stealth approaches that can be used to overcome each level (although the Prizrak guards may seem a bit stupid at times).

Let me explain further: in République Remastered, Hope doesn’t die. If she gets caught she will be escorted by a Prizrak guard to a confinement room; at this point you’ll need to escape from there, but that’s not really a challenging thing to accomplish. After getting caught 20 times or so in total, I couldn’t help but think that the AI was quite stupid as they returned Hope to the same room each and every time; it’s worth noting that the guard will seize Hope’s possessions before locking her up, but you also have the chance to pickpocket the guard to get them back.

There are also a few bonus stories that you can unravel through ordinary exploration, so try to look around if you’re interested in these things.

Camouflaj did a good, solid job at porting the game from mobile to PC. Moreover, they took this opportunity to upgrade Republique from Unity 4 to Unity 5, which brought substantial graphics improvements thanks to physically based shading and Enlighten GI; République Remastered still won’t win any awards for its graphics and that’s fine since its budget was far lower than any triple A title, however it’s now quite pretty to look at on PC.

More importantly for this kind of game, the plot is interesting and voice acting is convincing; I’d recommend playing the three episodes already available (the remaining two will be released at a later date) in a row, in order to become emotionally attached to the characters and understand the story better. If you have completed the game, don’t be shy and give us your opinion in the comments below.