I backed Republique, which is out as of today, on Kickstarter back in May of 2012. I’ve been waiting a long time to see it come out, and…well…here it is:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C1o7oHq4BE?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]

Initial reviews at Polygon and TouchArcade are highly positive, with both seeming to agree that the finished product does in fact deliver on the promise made during the Kickstarter campaign, namely that Republique would be a AAA-quality game designed for touch-input devices. Being a proponent of mobile gaming, and of smartphones as significant, powerful gaming platforms in their own right, I simply had to back the project during its crowdfunding campaign; this was — is, now, and hopefully will be going forward — a keen demonstration that smartphones could be used for so much more (gaming-wise) than manipulating farm animals or flinging birds at pigs.

What’s on the Apple App Store right now is just the first chapter in a series of five. Exordium tells the story of Hope, a young woman imprisoned in a dystopian surveillance state, who with the help of a hacker named Cooper attempts to escape captivity. The player doesn’t control Hope directly; she responds to directives from the player, but the player mainly controls doors, cameras, and other systems that can be hacked into. These, in turn, can be used to plot out routes and action plans for Hope, among other things.

And it sounds like the developers are just the right kind of cheeky, as well:

Exordium has an unexpected, quirky sense of humor. This is most obviously displayed in Cooper, who talks (using text-to-speech and elaborate emoticons) about being a reclusive nerd that gets picked on for having an extensive video game collection. Throughout the game, you can collect Cooper’s “game cartridges” — all of which are real-life iOS titles — that come along with a brief explanation of Cooper’s infatuation with them. It’s a funny, weird and kind of clever bit of character building, and cartridge even comes with a link to the app store if you’d like to download the game. The fourth wall shattered further when Cooper started talking about how episodic gaming is the best — and when I discovered a collection of popular Kickstarter campaign posters in his office.

Polygon does note that this Unity-powered game occasionally experiences AI and control issues, although not so often as to be game-breaking. The length of the campaign is, according to different reports, between 3 and 6 hours long, and has lots of bits of content to acquire along the way that add to the story of Hope and the 1984-like world she is trapped in.

The voice cast is pretty excellent, too.

Windows and OS X versions are on the way in the near future, but if you have an iOS device (iPad 2/iPhone 4S or better), I’d encourage you to spend the $4.99 and pick this one up. More than most, it’s a keen demonstration of just what kind of gaming is possible on a mobile platform.

(Image source: Polygon)