We. The Revolution Reviews

bad writing, arbitrary gameplay

As someone who's really interested by this part of french history, I love this game. Yes, it's not historically accurate ( I mean obviously, but I've seen people complain ) but it's really cool.

Never before in my life have I seen a game go from a perfect 10 to a perfect god knows what so fast than I have before here. Games like this make me dislike the steam review system, because this is one of the most "Mixed" games I have ever seen. Act 1 is a 10/10 masterpiece, Act 2 takes it to a 7/10 and Act 3 is a 0/10 disaster piece that dropped the ball so hard it left me reeling. First of all, let's get the praise out of way, and explain why the game would have been a perfect 10 if not for the ending. The game is a papers please style visual novel-ish, where your are a judge during a temporaly compressed reign of terror. It has fantastic art, creative animation, great presentation, incredibly music, and decent voice acting. And the idea of a historical courtroom drama is great! Your job is to examine evidence, case files, and witnesses to try and and manipulate the jury into getting an outcome that will piss off the least ammount of people. Yes, you are not seeking justice, you are seeking to protect your own head. You have the common folk, the revolutionaries, the royalists and your family. Acquiting, beheading, or imprisoning the accused will please different groups and displease others. If you displease your family, they will leave you. If you displease the revolutionaries you will be removed as a judge. If you displease the royalists they will send a hitsquad after you, and if you displease the common folk you will be lynched to death in the street. The game is surprisingly fun and well writen. All the cases are genuinely fun to read through and examine, questioning the people on trial and the witnesses is actually incredibly intresting with the way everyone has their own side of the story to tell, none of the cases ever felt bland or bad, I loved all of them. This is by far where the game shines the most and where most of the effort was put in. However, the more you progress the more it starts to unravel. 3 minigames are introduced. A territory control game with pawns, an intrigue minigame that progresses the conspiracy, and a battle minigame. All 3 are so undercooked as to be practically raw, make the pace of the game worse and make the game feel like a victim of its own scope creep. But whatever, you know what, the main narrative, the music, the art and the overarching theme of a historical courtroom drama is still so good that its worth it to push through. Until act 3. Act 3 shits the bed so hard in the writing department that it retroactively ruins everything that came before it. Stop reading here if you plan to play it because knowing this information will ACTUALLY make you unable to enjoy act 1 and 2. Here's a lot of things that happen in act 3: * The french revolution and the entire conspiracy of the multiple warring factions in the city vying for control was orchestrated by your long lost brother in an effort to spite your dad. * Your brother wants to siege the city and kill every single parisian in it. * While the city is under siege being threated by a madman who wants to kill every man, woman and child in it, the feminists show up and demand you end all sexism or they will open the gates and allow him to kill everyone. So you sign a decleration ending all sexism in paris. * A black guy shows up and asks you to end all racism and in exchange he will assemble the avengers to help you fight your brother. So you sign another decleration ending all racism in paris. * No matter how good your relationship with your family is and how many cases you burned to please them, your son leaves you and your wife tries to assassinate you. * It turns out this entire thing was actually a simulation/game orchestrated by the literal puppetmaster who exists in a different reality, and you, the main character, is the chosen one meant to save the world. * Then the game turns into a shity turn based strategy game where you fight your brother using the black guy's army??? * And in the end it turns nothing mattered because the puppetmaster was in control the whole time evidenced by us witnessing him literally control napoleon using a vodoo doll at the end. If it sounds like I'm making this shit up, yeah NO SHIT. That was my reaction too. Someone explain to me how you can take a perfectly servicable historical conspiracy courtroom intrigue drama and turn it into a fucking multidimentional chosen one story??? I don't understand how the people who wrote act 1 also wrote act 3, I'm genuinely at a loss here. Rating this game is hard because, I don't regret playing this game, but it dissapointed me so much it left me speechless.