by:	March 30, 2005

Star Wars: Republic Commando is a totally new breed of Star Wars game. What started with KOTOR penetrating the RPG genre, we know how Republic Commando penetrating the first-person strategy shooter genre—and for the most part succeeding. The title has a very engaging single-player element, combining many old ideas from many great titles to create an extremely sharp game. While the multiplayer is a miss, the rest of the game is a definite hit. It is also probably the first Star Wars title to take the not-so-great new Star Wars movies (or the universe based around it) and turn it into something great, engaging, and as far away from the convoluted story of Episode II as possible.

You start the title off in a cloning pod, being a clone of Jenga Fett, you find out that unlike the other clones you will be specially trained to be a far more elite clone. You along with three others create Team Delta Squad. Throughout the title you will basically travel through three different areas—one is based in the world were the battle between the Separatist (droids) and the Republic (clone soldiers) and you are in the middle of all the chaos covertly thwarting their attempts to advance against the Republic. There you will encounter puny droids, massive heavy Assault droids, droids that roll into balls and spread out into killing machines, and tons of disgusting flying creatures that come at you with spears and lava throwing artillery. After playing sections of that level for nearly three hours, you are catapulted onto a ship were you find a lot of new mysterious enemies such as robots that cling to your face and suck out life, and green pig aliens with of all other things—shotguns!

The single player campaign is definitely intense though. At any given moment you are pit up against two-dozen of different kinds of enemies and you must make split decisions or else your entire crew will be destroyed. One battle can take up to twenty minutes just to advance past, all while having to complete on site objectives like hacking a terminal. Yes the game is objective base, but the objectives don’t vary much. You usually have to order a squad member to place a charge, hack a terminal, or break open a door in order to advance. Ordering your squad is the hitch within the game and while it can add on to gameplay, it doesn’t need to be used as much as one would think. The game will place the main objectives out in front of you, so that if a charge needs to be placed to blow-up a wall, when you look in that area it prompts you to press the ‘A’ button to order your squad member to being working on it. Other times you would need to definitely order your squad around is to take sniping position, or two arm a turret. One feature I found to be nifty was the ability to order them all to fire on the same enemy at once simply by shooting at the enemy and holding down ‘A’. Each of your crew members eventually have three weapons that you gather by having an original laser rifle, and receiving add-ons for them. One add-on turns it into a sniper, another into a grenade launcher. You also always have a pistol, and can have a secondary weapon such as one of your enemies weapons. All of these weapons are accessed simply by pressing in different directions on your directional pad. If you crew members ever get low on health, and you can tell by if their health block goes from 100% green to yellow or orange, you must order them to get Bacta. To do this, you simply hold ‘A’ in the area of the Bacta and order them to secure the area, telling them all to heal up. These Bacta stations are a definite help, but there are almost to many of them making the game a bit to easy. The squad members however, have very good A.I. and it is evident in how well they snipe out enemies, and other tasks.

On the downside of Republic Commando, the campaign is pretty short. Just when you think it is about to really pick up, the game suddenly comes to a halt, leaving room for a definite sequel. The fact that you can’t have two or more people playing on Campaign also takes away from it, but for the purposes of commanding an entire squad by yourself I can tell why they did this. Another thing I found strange about the game, is it was a bit buggy. Many times I would fine my squad members stuck on a corner or on top of a rock and they would not be able to move without me restarting the level and making it past the same area without them getting stuck.