Real-world political success is an unpredictable thing that doesn't happen overnight, and re-creating politics in a game isn't any easier. We've been watching Elixir Studios' Republic: The Revolution develop over the last few years, catching glimpses of it at major game shows, including the last three E3s. But only recently have we finally had a chance to get our hands on the controls and see what this long-awaited strategy game really plays like. The game's story, which involves a conspiracy to overthrow a corrupt dictator in a former Soviet republic, seems like a recipe for a political thriller novel. But don't expect to see a red carpet lining your path to taking over the president's mansion--success in Republic will require some thought and effort.

Republic challenges you to take your grassroots party to the top and unseat a corrupt dictator--by any means.

Republic takes place in the fictional former Soviet state of Novistrana, which is currently under the thumb of President Karasov. As you might expect, he's not a very democratic (or very nice) leader, and soon after the game begins, he outlaws all political parties besides his own. It's your role to challenge Karasov and remove him from office. But this goal seems quite lofty at the start of the game--you'll start out with little more than an acute case of political ambition. Meanwhile, Karasov can call out the military and secret police to back up his regime.

Like many strategy games, Republic will give you a number of starting choices to make that can determine the strategic options that will work best for you. You'll begin by naming your character and political party, and then you'll make more-pressing choices, assigning points to four abstractly named attributes: power, presence, control, and charisma. All the other characters in the game--not just your leader--have these attributes, and they'll determine how well those characters can carry out their orders. In our brief run through the game, we opted to spend all our character points on power, which is rough gauge of a character's political connections and ability to impose his will on others. Fortunately, you can look forward to earning more attribute points every time you gain a character level, so you'll have the option of improving your character in other areas later in the game.

The other major choice at the outset of the game is determining your party's ideological stance. The choice is represented as a triangle of the three ideologies--wealth, influence, and force--that can be mixed in any numerical proportion you please. This party emphasis determines which segment of the population will best respond to your overall message and which characters and henchmen will work best with you. These three concepts also correspond to the three resources in the game that are spent when your character and lieutenants attempt actions. To keep things easy to understand, Republic will have a color-coding system that may be all you need to distinguish people, neighborhoods, and actions that depend on wealth from those that depend on force or influence. Despite these abstract-sounding features, the game's interface and mechanics actually seem pretty straightforward.

Your career will take you to three living cities, each with thousands of inhabitants and detailed architecture.

Your character starts off as the lone leader of a small grassroots party. You can scroll around the 3D view to investigate the city, right-clicking on passersby to see if they'll stop and say something significant. Any actions that characters take in this 3D view are shown in real time, but you may not see any significant effects if you don't have sufficient influence in that particular neighborhood, or if you haven't explicitly ordered your minions to scout out the area. This is effectively a political fog of war, and it plays a critical role in the game of intelligence and misinformation. At any time, you can jump to a more abstract view of the city that shows the neighborhood borders, which parties hold sway over what percentages of the local population, and key landmarks. When you've done the work to learn about an area, you can locate important neutral or opposing characters who can be targets for your actions. The lower-left part of the screen holds a foldaway view of the main characters in your party and their attributes, available actions, and upcoming schedule of actions. Along the bottom is a readout of your current supplies of the three main resources, and the lower right has a display of what might be the most important resource of them all: time.