Review: STAR WARS: REPUBLIC COMMANDO Seems To Be Missing Some Squad Memebers
Star Wars: Republic Commando was one of my fondest gaming memories when I was younger. I love the four specialized soldiers, the team commands and the gunplay in general. The release of this game on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 fine-tunes some of the visuals and bugs with the game, but does little more than that while also missing a big component that made this game truly entertaining years ago.
It’s been a long time since most of us have played this game and I’m surprised at how well it holds up. The moment to moment gameplay against droids and aliens feels a bit better than I expected. It still feels clunky and a little archaic compared to modern standards, but it is impressive how good the game is for its time. The A.I. is more aggressive than I remembered, making fights pretty entertaining. However, a lot of the team combat and commands that you give are more for a false sense of immersion than actual tactical gameplay. At the time, the game boasted a lot of innovations by being a squad and controlling multiple people inside of a first person shooter. But all these positions and commands are very artificial and so heavily scripted that they almost impede real gameplay. It’s so fun to give commands to your units and can be quite useful in battle, but it feels far less immersive and smart as it did before.
This is a re-release of the game, not a remaster. And while some of the Frame rates and character models are much smoother, the textures and character models are still extremely clunky and show some of the ugliest sides of the generation. It’s definitely playable and was a good looking game for its day, but it hasn’t aged well. I would have loved a full remaster with some Battlefront 2 level graphics, but there are no plans for that at the moment.
The main issue to be had with this port is the total lack of multiplayer. While the game was built mainly as a single player game, the multiplayer added a lot of extra hours to the game’s life. While some people might not have ever played the multiplayer modes in the past, it was surprisingly good and is pretty unfortunate to have such a bare bones port come to modern consoles, especially because online co-op or online multiplayer could’ve helped this game thrive for a while.
If you were a fan of the original Republic Commando game and you want to play through the campaign again, then this is a fine way to do it. The lack of multiplayer from the original version is particularly odd because the graphical update is quite minimal. For fans of the game or lovers of shooters AND Star Wars, this might be worth it, but otherwise, there are many other, better things to spend your time and money on.
