“The Most Lethal Weapon in the Galaxy… Your Squad”
Star Wars: Republic Commando
Developer: LucasArts| Publisher: Electronic Arts K.K.| Released: February 17, 2005| System: Xbox (played on Xbox 360)| Originally Played From: March 3, 2019 – March 22, 2019
SW: RC is a cult classic, squad-based, single-player first-person shooter wherein you play as a squad of Republic clone troopers. The game takes place during the prequel trilogy.
Geonosis: We gotta kill a guy named Sun Fac.
Scorch: “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
I like how you can blast the giant bugs apart. If one gets blood on you, it shows up on your visor, which will soon clean itself! Knowing Star Wars, it’s probably plasma.
The big bugs remind me of Starship Troopers, though these bugs are bipedal.
Now that we’ve assassinated Sun Fac, our mission is to infiltrate the sepratists’ droid foundry.
We had to go through a nest of uggo buggos where eggs hatched unpredictably.
Your fellow commandos sometimes praise your maneuvers.
We blew up the foundry. Now, we need to sneak onboard a nearby sep vessel and steal the launch codes for the core fleet.
One of the criticisms I have is that the game drops frames frequently. Games from this era, late into the fifth generation/at the cusp of the sixth, had rough looks sometimes.
I want to start doing articles about the aesthetics of games. There are some interesting stories about how some games wound up looking the way that they did, like Bubsy 3D…
I’m noticing that older games have more interesting usage of force feedback than newer ones.
Delta 40 is voiced by Kyle Hebert.
Delta Squad consists of 38 (your guy), 40, 62 (Scorch, who’s kind of annoying, but also kind of funny), and 07. 40 is the Fixer; he hacks (or “slices”) stuff. 07 is Sev; he likes to fight, and he may not be very bright.
Let’s Blow This Thing and Go Home
It turns out that sabotaging the systems of a ship that you’re on is a bad idea. The climax of the Geonosis mission has you trying to download the codes (which takes 61 seconds) before the ship explodes… in two minutes. The toughest part of the game yet.
One year later. Republic forces are stretched thin. Delta finds itself on more and more dangerous missions.
Scorch and Sev do a little fist bump before we drop into our next mission to investigate a Republic vessel once thought lost. We need to retrieve her flight data.
This level is kind of atmospheric. You split up your squad at the mission’s outset, and you have to explore the dark and isolated ship alone for several minutes. Until you encounter a clone trooper that was hiding in the torpedo bay trying to launch a torpedo. He’s killed by an unseen assailant. 38 laments the waste of “good genes”.
Scavenger droids have infested the ship.
There are some nice heat wave effects.
The ship was also infested by Trandoshans (big lizard people). They have creepy laughs. Their weapons are the shotgun-esque ACP Air Array. They also attack with knives.
Your basic gun is a blaster. In the first mission, you acquire a sniper rifle and anti-armor attachment. Occasionally, you can pick up the weapons of other enemies, like the Thandos and Geo Elites. You also have a pistol for backup; it has infinite ammo, but can overheat.
A pretty smart method of balancing your arsenal; the pistol isn’t uselessly weak, but it has a limitation in that you won’t be able to mindlessly shoot it constantly.
I like how the guns themselves display how much ammo they have left. It’s more immersive than other shooters.
It takes forever to reunite your squad. 40 is found under normal conditions, but 07 was interrogated and 62 got imprisoned. He said that he hid his portion of the flight data someplace that 38 didn’t want to know. This game…
Sometimes, the guys get snarky if you give them orders, then cancel them, then reassign them. It was an accident, guys!
One of the chapters is named Attack of the Clones. Remember how everyone hated that title when it was first revealed? Do we still hate it? I don’t know. I never hated it, per se, but it’s pretty… blunt.
Sometimes, the guys are a bit dim.
The Trandos enslaved Wookies and collected their pelts (yikes), but what were they doing on this ship? In regards to the idea of getting the Wookies on our side, Scorch jubilantly exclaimed, “Wookie life debts for all!”
The seps supplied the Trandos with battle droids.
Another weapon that the elite Trandos drop is the concussion rifle. It’s cool. It fires a shot that expands outward and explodes. If you hit someone with it, they’re stunned.
We destroyed the Trandos’ dropship before they could escape the vessel.
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