Star Wars: Republic Commando

the space 'nam the weird kid in middle school fantasized about after watching attack of the clones. part of me wishes the tactical elements were fleshed out a bit; space S.W.A.T., if you would.

Republic Commando is one of those games I knew about for a long time but never got to play due to not owning an XBOX or having a gaming PC when I was younger, so it was a game I sort of had to accept I never was going to play at the time, even though I was a huge Star Wars fan in the mid 2000s and had played almost every Star Wars game on PS2 and PS3. Recently the game came to recent consoles and it was on sale on PSN so I decided to pick it up for like 10 bucks and finally give this game a shot, a game that I missed out on my childhood even though I'm no longer as big a Star Wars fan as I was then.

I have to say, I would have had a love/hate relationship with this as a teenager. This game has you playing a clone commando during the Clone Wars, and you lead a team of 3 others to fight through various droids and mercenaries to help the Republic during the war. You go through 3 major areas and lead your team through various objectives. What I enjoy about this is the unique concept, you control your team by pointing to different objects and giving them commands like during combat you can lead your different squad members and have them hide behind cover and snipe or throw grenades, and various points you have to have your team perform commands like opening up doors or hacking consoles to precede, If any of your team dies you or your other team can revive them and if you die they can revive you. If you all die its game over. Its actually pretty fun going through enemies and having your team help you out and using them tactically to clear out areas, and the AI for the most part is decent, although it sometimes can be annoying, like it wasn't too uncommon for my team to rush headfirst right in front of powerful enemies and die in a few seconds, instead of backing off and going from a distance.

I think what makes this game flawed is the difficulty is a bit brutal at times and often you will run low on ammo and have to rely a bit too much on your team. Certain enemies in this game can be bullet sponges and can even eat through an entire clip of ammo for a single gun, and some missions ammo can be scarce so if you're out you will basically have to hide and have your team take everyone out. This gets annoying sometimes, especially in later missions where you can't really rely on your team to kill everyone. The other thing is some areas will just spam waves and waves of super powerful enemies and if you are low on ammo you just kind of have to rush through and have your team do the objective quick and hope you can do it without your team being taken out or you. This wasn't just one time, but several times in the game I had to just rush through an area and have luck guide me, usually after a few tries. The other thing is the auto saves can sometimes suck and put you back far, but the game does let you save whenever you want so this is a mild issue, but still it sucks that you have to save frequent manually.

The game does have all the major enemies from Clones Wars you got the regular droids, the super droids, the droidekas, Grievous' guard droids, and the bug guys from Attack of the Clones, plus a few other enemies, but I do feel the game throws the same enemies at you for most of the game and it gets a bit old fighting through the same droid and mercenary enemies. Also I didn't really like the battle droid design in this, I prefer the way they look in the Battlefront games. The story of this was pretty basic and straightforward, its mostly just about using your team to blow shit up and kill a bunch of bad guys, you know typical Star Wars, there aren't any jedi in this game.

I mean as a teen I'd probably have liked this a lot more, although also would have been super frustrated with the difficulty, but maybe after 15 years the magic of wanting to play a game vanishes. Still I had more fun with this than I should have and it is one of the better Star Wars games, and the team mechanics were fun and the game was more often fun than frustrating, but those frustrating moments tended to just stand out. It also is around 8 or so hours so it is a pretty good length. I just wish there was a little more weapon variety, slight more enemy variety, and less damage sponge enemies. Also I feel like the objectives in this do tend to get repetitive, most of the game is go to this area, hack this console while fighting enemies with a team member or blow this thing up in your way to proceed, then go to next area, do same exact thing with slight different background, and well that's about 80% of the game. It would have been nice if they had a few different missions like one where you fight alongside a jedi or something, but I guess they wanted to make this a pure combat game just about the Clones. Either way, I enjoyed this but it does show its age a little and does get a little repetitive. But still, there isn't any other Star Wars game out there like this and its probably in the 10 ten Star Wars games of all time, but it is in bad need of either an updated sequel or a possible remake with more fine tuned mechanics and graphic style.

This is one of the games in which i played the demo level way more than the actual game. I was still satisfied with the rest of the game when i got around to it, but that demo level was really everything that i wanted the game to be, allowing you to team up with your squad with different talents and wreck some alien scum. Its pretty visceral for a Star Wars game, even going to the point of splitting alien blood on the players helmet whenever you get a point blank kill. Big weapon variety, and of course a squad that can comply to your orders swiftly and efficiently.

It was really innovative for the time, even now it is apparent that it didnt always work. The game also had a couple of missions in which you were isolated from the rest, and these felt notably weaker. A lot of the spongier enemies also werent that fun to play against. I really havent visited this game in a long time, but it was surely one of the best fps experiences i had at that time.