Star Wars. It seems like the franchise is absolutely everywhere these days. Wild, considering back in the late 80s and early 90s George Lucas wasn’t even sure if it was still marketable and tasked Timothy Zahn with a trilogy of books to see if the brand was still viable. Countless books, comics, bad movies, bearable movies, toys, and cartoons later, it seems that it was.
Star Wars: Republic Commando from Aspyr and Disney was originally released on the Xbox and PC wayyyy back in 2005. Yes, original Xbox. Yes, 2005. This is a 16 year old Star Wars game that a significant number of gamers never got to play. Some of us played it back in those misty days of yore and it was a solid single player squad-based FPS before there were many squad-based FPSs. It took the ideas put forth in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (also known as ‘Ack! Why?”) and turned them into an interesting story based around Republic elite clone troopers fighting against the Geonosians and the Trandoshan and ends up in vicious battles on the Wookie home planet of Kashyyyk. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, suffice it to say it hits the modern Star Wars fanboy bullet points well. The plot is excellent, the dialogue and voice acting are great, and the overall look and feel of the game was fantastic…in 2005.
Now, it’s easy to look back on Republic Commando with a critical eye. And that critical eye is definitely not for the plot and dialogue, because they’re beyond reproach. This is one great Star Wars adventure from a story standpoint. Gameplay on the other hand may be a bit less appealing to some. This is not a modern game. Once you’re able to get moving, you’ll notice that while controls are decent and the game moves well overall on the Switch, it’s more than a bit difficult to, well, shoot enemies. Targeting is pretty rough here (aside from the sniper rifle), and your main weapon might as well be a BB gun. Manage to hit enemies in the head and they die pretty well. Anywhere else, well, good luck? This is a pattern throughout the game. Limited weapons, limited ammo, tough shots to make. Chances are good that you’ll run out of ammo quickly. Turns out that’s a good thing, since your pistol is way more powerful than your rifle, a brutal oversight. It’s also more accurate, making it easier to kill enemies with. Special weapons are neat in Republic Commando, but you rarely get them and they invariably don’t hold much ammo, relegating you to ineffectual rifles with stormtrooper accuracy much of the time.
If that sounds a bit weird, well, you get used to it. It takes a while but between stellar bursts of believable dialogue and the occasional tense moment, the overall weaponry and aiming is at least bearable most of the time. Sadly, the level design is also rather dated, consisting of heavily linear levels with scripted events that drive you in a single direction. Every combat is scripted with trigger points and a set number of enemies (excluding the bot spawners) and once you know where enemies appear, no fuss no muss. You can just zip in, shoot them in the head and keep going. Strategically, it’s a bit painful, especially when major enemies can just disappear for no apparent reason and you can bypass the entire fight with them (this only happened once during the course of this review, to be fair). Combat is tedious, slow, and just not that exciting.
But speaking of strategy, Republic Commando is a team-based strategy FPS. That means that you control a team, consisting of three troopers, each with their own specialties…sort of. One is introduced as a sniper, one as a healer, and one as a hacker (called a slicer). Weirdly, every one of them can do everything at any time and you can set up your entire team as snipers at certain points in the game. Issuing orders is done by using the Switch d-pad, but you can only usually order them to man sniper points and gun turrets, hack computers, or get bacta. Bacta, like the bacta tank Luke is in at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back, is a magical healing liquid that revitalizes your health and the enemies have left convenient healing stations almost everywhere. This is great, because you’ll definitely need them constantly, and incredibly irritating because you will get so tired of hearing “Go get some bacta, soldier” that you’ll want to lose the game purposely, throw your controller through a window and go join a monastery. Yeah, it’s a bit irritating. But the game is 16 years old, what do you expect? Back to strategy. It would be great to tell your troops to cover certain points or have them, say, make a few decisions, but they definitely don’t. And true tactical decisions are not really necessary. If there are sniper points or guns, man them. Play carefully and you’ll win and move on, advancing the story. There’s no real tactical challenge or way to screw up, which is kind of disappointing. Republic Commando is definitely more surface strategy and designed in a manner that shows its age. There are some neat perks here though.
Manage to get killed in Republic Commando and you’re not dead. If squad members are alive you can summon them to heal you and if they fall, you can heal them as well, assuming you don’t get killed trying. This essentially gives you four lives instead of one, making your chances of success much higher. The incorporation of team healing is smooth and effective and it really makes the commandos feel like a cohesive team, something you might not expect from a game this old. Occasionally, they’ll go heal themselves on their own too, which is nice. Overall, between the banter, the cover fire, and the healing mechanics, there’s a lot of positive going on in Republic Commando that you might not expect, especially after reading the above paragraphs. You can even switch from helmet mode to an unobstructed view, which is pretty cool. Get guts on your faceshield? It has laser windshield wipers! The good with the bad, right?
There’s more bad to come however. The worst thing about Star Wars: Republic Commando by far is the visual presentation. The game simply looks terrible on the Switch. It looks muddy undocked and it looks worse docked. A lot worse. Angles are jagged on the obviously visible polygons that most things are made up of, and textures are blurry. There’s a limited color palette to, making many levels dreary and monotonous. Looking up old footage of the original for comparison yielded confirmation that the game wasn’t the best looking, but even original footage looked equivalent to the Switch and some footage had been upscaled and looked significantly better. Why a game this old looks this bad is unclear, but the Switch should be more than capable of better than the muddy mess that many of the visuals on the Switch end up being. It’s honestly more than a bit disappointing and will likely shatter more than a few fond memories.
Finally, there’s the length. This has been a perennial complaint about Star Wars: Republic Commando. There’s just not enough game. The entire single player campaign (yes, there’s some ok multiplayer but that’s not what you’re here for….go away) is only three main stages long. Sure, they’re broken up into sections but you can still beat the game in a day without breaking a sweat. Should it be longer? Yes. Is it still awesome? Also yes. But when you’re spending $15, you might expect to get a bit more than a day’s play out of a game, right?
Regardless of how you cut it, Star Wars: Republic Commando is a mixed bag. On the one hand, you have an absolutely spectacular script with top tier acting and voice work, great backdrops, and some interesting combat conventions and gimmicks. On the other, combat is flat and overall uninteresting, there aren’t a wide variety of enemies, and level design is incredibly dated. What should have happened here is a full remaster with updated visuals, modernized tactical controls, and a refined aiming system. That would have been worth $40, even with the short length of the game. Sadly, that is not what happened. Instead, we get a Switch port of a 16 year old game which runs mostly smoothly, unless one of your commandos gets, um, stuck in a rock and you have to lure enemies to kill him so he falls to the ground and becomes freed. Great clips this is not. But at the same time, it’s a fun game, constantly see-sawing between frustrating and spectacular. That’s still pretty darn impressive for how old Republic Commando is, and it’s great that a whole new generation gets to experience it. Should you buy it? If you’re a Star Wars fan, yes. Definitely. The story alone is worth the frustration. If not, well, it’s a slightly buggy sub-standard FPS with a solid plot. Buy or buy not, there is no try. Play it I did. Like it I did. Old is it. Enjoy it you may.
This review was based on a digital copy of Star Wars: Republic Commando provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in undocked mode and in docked mode with a Switch Pro Controller. Star Wars: Republic Commando is also available on the Playstation 4. All screenshots are of actual gameplay.
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