Stewart brings us another Friends of the Cast article, this time featuring a retro-review of the fan-favorite video game from 2005, developed and published by LucasArts, Republic Commando!
Leo has recently started playing Rogue Squadron for the YouTube channel and with GoG re-releasing all the old LucasArts classics, I thought I would also delve back into Star Wars videogame history.
So for the past few years I have heard people say that Republic Commando is one of the best Star Wars games of all time. I don’t remember it that way…
Don’t get me wrong. I remember enjoying it, but I don’t remember it like Kotor or Battlefront. Or maybe I was a very unimpressionable 11 year old when it came out.
So I replayed the entire game to find out if the internet is wearing rose tinted nostalgia glasses or if I just did not appreciate it at the time.
Opening Impressions
So I bought the game from Good Old Games, downloaded it, booted it up, launch new campaign and… Crash.
(After some investigating on the internet, apparently 2005 bit mapping is not supported by modern graphics cards)
So I rebooted it with max graphics settings, apart from bit mapping, and the intro starts. Excellent.
Sound Design
I wore some fairly decent headphones while playing Republic Commando and the sound design is superb. Voice acting from Temuera Morrison is decent with good variants for your commando brethren.
The soundtrack is of epic proportion and feels right for the game, still one of the best star wars soundtracks. It sounds almost nothing like the movies, while still retaining that Star Wars essence.
The new weapons sound good with the original weapons sounding like they should.
Everything sounds clean and crisp.
Overall Game Design
The intro holds up reasonably well, painting you and your team as the SAS of the Star Wars universe, a breed apart from regular clones.
There are some muddy textures in the beginning, but everything after the first hour still looks graphically good. But you would expect it to with only 3 environments in the entire game, with 80% of those environments being corridors. So many corridors…
To be fair the last quarter of the game does give you opportunities for flanking, but that doesn’t change the gameplay, as flanking doesn’t benefit you in any way.
Corridor shooting flies in the face of everything that commandos should be doing. Covert operations, executing high priority targets, ambushes, reconnaissance, even search and rescue, any of these mission types could have been implemented. But sadly the missions that do start in a tactical way last up to 5 minutes before it turns into you and your team against ridiculous waves of battle droids or trandos. I have must have killed 1000-2000 battle droids and around 500-1000 trandoshans through the course of the game. And it wasn’t particularly good fun either.
The Feedback
The shooting feels really poor, with straight up no feedback with the main battle rifle. Arguably the most important weapon in the game has zero recoil. Some of the special weapons are fun, but you need to pump so many rounds into anything apart from the standard battle droid you run out of ammo consistently. Which leaves you with the pistol, which feels terrible.
I’m not kidding when I say that I unloaded all 300 of my battle rifle rounds into two super battle droids and only one went down. That is game design shooting done wrong.
Instead I had to order my squad mates, who have unlimited ammo, to shoot hard to kill enemies.
Your Squadmates
The squad mechanics are non-existent, with the only useful one being ‘use your sniper rifle on this low wall’ because apparently clone commandos cannot use snipers, or any specialty weapon for that matter, unless they are standing at a waist high wall.
So the commandos aren’t very tactical, but why would they be if the game is just a corridor shooter?
Difficulty
Play on normal difficulty and you will go down faster than a slippery wampa hole. So about half way through I set the difficulty to easy and still would occasionally go down.
But the game does have a squad revive, so my teammates would revive me unless there was a complete squad wipe.
Also the checkpointing is really well placed, I only ever lost 30 seconds maximum if I died.
So Should You Replay It?
Well that depends, if you remember it being one of the best Star Wars games ever. No, keep that memory and don’t ruin it for yourself.
Do you remember it being decent and have exhausted Kotor 1 and 2, both battlefronts and all of the Jedi Knight series?
Sure play it; it’s only six to eight hours long.
Ps. A quick aside, you can order your team mates to use special weapons behind the corpses of wookies. I guess because they are big enough for a full grown man to hide behind? Pretty brutal if you ask me.
Republic Commando is available from Good Old Games as well as steam for digital download.