Great once you get going.
This is a real-time sim where you start out with just yourself, but you can recruit members into your faction. The gist of the game is to up your faction's popularity in different districts of the current city by spreading your propaganda. Basically, you issue a command to one of your party members, and they spend a turn doing that. Some actions gain influence, some decrease other faction's influence, and there are even some special actions, such as roughing up a specific person to make them shut their yaps, or even go so far as killing them.
What Republic lacks, though, is a training mode of some sort, or intruductory sequence. I spent a couple of days not even knowing what to do, but once you figure it out, this game is great.