Star Wars: Republic Commando

Genre: First-Person Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: There are multiple Star Wars bundles on Nintendo Switch. If you want a breakdown of which bundles contain which games, please check this page.)

Star Wars: Republic Commando is a First-Person Shooter originally released on PC and the original Xbox in 2005, and at the time it was a fairly high-profile exclusive game for Microsoft’s console. In 2021, this game’s visuals and controls have been brushed up to work on modern platforms, with this version of the game ported to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch.

Republic Commando takes place in the timeline of the films that ranges from the end of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones to Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and places you into the role of a commander of an elite squad of clone troopers given special assignments in the midst of the clone wars. Throughout the game, players coordinate the actions of their team consisting of demolitions expert “Scorch”, technician “Fixer”, and sniper “Sev”, who despite all being clones each have a distinctive personality and different-colored armor highlights, with this game’s story largely less interested in focusing on some big focal point in the series’ story and more on just following one set of characters through the chaos of one of the series’ biggest conflicts.

Being a game from 2005, Republic Commando doesn’t look anywhere near as impressive as it once did – the environment and character models are somewhat low-poly by today’s standards, and textures are occasionally a bit blurry. However, mostly this game has aged well, and it is helped by a visual upgrade that ensures a consistently good framerate and overall resolution that gives the game a clean look 16 years after its original release, Republic Commando isn’t likely to impress anyone, but it’s not an especially ugly game, either.

While the visuals don’t impress, the game’s sound and music all still work beautifully, with the voice acting for characters and the Star Wars series’ typical use of its traditional sound effects and John Williams-esque score all not only help to ground this game in the universe it takes place in, but also give its characters a good amount of personality. It is perhaps this element of the game that has aged the best.

The controls in this release have been reworked somewhat to better fit modern standards for the genre and modern controllers, though players may still want to tinker with button assignments in the game’s menus. Thankfully you’re free to do so here, though you can’t change things like sight-aiming and crouching being set to toggle and hold, unfortunately. Also a bit disappointing is the lack of any use of the Nintendo Switch’s unique features, with no gyroscopic motion control or touchscreen support here. Still, the game controls relatively well, and is undoubtedly better than the original, so it’s hard to complain too much.

As for the gameplay itself, this is… fine. It’s a pretty standard campaign-based First-Person Shooter, and it doesn’t do anything that makes it especially dated, neither does it do much to set itself apart. Probably its biggest signature element is the squad-based focus of the game, with the idea that players have tactical control over their squad during combat. However, I felt like much of this control was only in the presentation, not the mechanics of the gameplay.

Players are rarely afforded much opportunity to command their squad in any decisive or unique way – usually you’re given designated spots to tell your squadmates to focus on, and based on the context they’ll do whatever the game feels they should be doing in that spot. But these spots are fairly sparsely spaced throughout a level, and they most frequently come up at choke points where you are forced to use them, rather than making a choice that will lead you to victory.

Other times, such as during combat, you can assign your squad to take on different behaviors, but they’re often so self-sufficient that they’ll do their thing without any need for input or a command from you. Rather than waiting for me to remember the command to tell a squadmate to heal a downed ally, they ended up doing that on their own without prompting, and after the battle, everyone lined up at the healing station to treat their injuries without any need for me to tell them to. Realistic? Perhaps, but it made it clear that my “command” of the situation was more of a formality than a necessity

Before concluding things here, I have to point out this game’s multiplayer, because… well, there isn’t any. While the original Xbox and PC version of the game included multiplayer that contemporary critics said was underwhelming, it still would have been nice to have that included here as opposed to the nothing we actually got.

Still, despite the loss of multiplayer and the elements here that have aged somewhat, this is still a decent First-Person Shooter with a high level of polish that shines even with a decade and a half of dust on top. By modern standards, there’s very little about the gameplay here that truly stands out, but this is still a good use of the Star Wars license that’s still worth playing if you’re a fan of the franchise. And if you’re not a big Star Wars fan, it is nevertheless a decent inexpensive First-Person Shooter, albeit not an especially noteworthy one.

tl;dr – Star Wars: Republic Commando is still a decent First-Person Shooter even 15 years after its original release, but not an especially noteworthy one. While the game has aged reasonably well, it doesn’t do anything all that noteworthy for the genre. It’s still a decent entry in the genre, but without its license there wouldn’t be much here to recommend it over other more modern First-Person Shooters.

Grade: C+

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