It’s Thursday, which means it’s time to honour something from the past. Let’s go back to the Clone Wars.
It’s my first week here, and I’ve been told it’s entirely OK if I do some things of my own accord. So I’m starting up a series that will, as you would expect from a massive PC tragic, take a trip back in time to celebrate some of gaming’s enthralling back catalogue.
Star Wars has been on my mind this week. Disney’s doing a massive push, as you would expect in the lead up to the revival of the Battlefront series and the movie franchise. Hell, Star Wars is even making an appearance in the Mount & Blade series (thanks to a modder, obviously). So it seems only fair to give a thought to Star Wars: Republic Commando, a first-person shooter released in early 2005 on PC, Xbox and mobiles.
“Join your pod, and embrace your destiny as their leader. Join Delta Squad.”
Republic Commando revolved around the deployment of Delta Squad, a group of crack clone commandos that were bred from the factories on Kamino. The troupe carries out a series of missions that become more frantic and suicidal as the war carries on.
Gameplay revolved around a mix of standard first-person shooting and a cut-down version of the AI order system used in the Battlefront series. Environments would often have contextual actions, and the Delta Squad members had preferred roles governing their default actions — although you could override this to force the squad to spread out on command, move to a specific location or just hunt down the remaining enemies.
The campaign roughly took 8 to 9 hours to beat, while the multiplayer experience was generally considered to be inferior (but not wholly unenjoyable) when compared to the Battlefront series. You can still play Republic Commando online thanks to GameRanger, which filled the void left by GameSpy when its servers shut down at the end of May last year.
Republic Commando is still available through Steam for US$10 and is still warmly loved, with a 94% rating out of 2,230 reviews at the time of writing.
What are your memories of Republic Commando? I feel like we might see more of the series in the years to come, perhaps not as a series of games but as another animated series or a spin-off film.
Comments
14 responses to “Thursday Tribute: Star Wars Republic Commando”
This game is absolutely wikid coop
I highly rate this game
dippa
Bought it as part of a Steam sale last Christmas, eventually will get around to giving it a go since I’ve always wanted to try it. Seems good from all accounts and this seems to back it up so, I guess I’ll bump it up on the pile of shame list :p
I always liked the way when you took a critical hit you could tell your AI buddies to patch you up or to secure the area before coming to get you… not like pretty much everything else where if you take a stray round from having to babysit your squaddies they just run back and forth until you die instead of actually contributing to your mission survivability in any way.
Fun fact: the creative director for this is the creative director on Halo 5. Seems like that explains the co-op (unless you’re into split screen :’c ) direction it’s taking.
Never played this, but my favourite Star Wars game was Dark Forces. Mmmm, so good.
I think I own this game on Steam, maybe I’ll give a play sometime.
All I can say is….. Scorch <3
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418195/quotes
I’ve been waiting for a sequel to this since I finished the game. I NEED CLOSURE.
Loved this game in the 90s. Sadly, can’t get it to run on Steam these days. Maybe they’ve patched it and I should try again…
Uh … It came out in 2005 … You thinking of Dark Forces? …
You’re totally right! No, Dark Forces was amazing too, but I was thinking of Republic Commando. I mis-remembered as 90s because I played it at the parents’ house. 😀
I loved this game, but I got stuck at this part in a tunnel. I couldn’t get past a horizontal pipe or something. After numerous attempts I gave up, convinced my game was broken. It was cast into the recesses of the back of the tv cabinet for months. It played on my mind and eventually I fished it out and booted up the save. I walked up to that damn pipe, pressed Y (or whatever it was on xbox) and the character jumped over it.
I TOTALLY FORGOT I COULD JUMP.
My most shameful gaming story yet
Much respect, enjoyed playing the heck out of this on the original Xbox and PC.
It wasn’t anything groundbreaking but was very fun and i enjoyed each of the different squad mates personalities too =)
Anyways, why haven’t more context sensitive squad control games come out? Republic Commando did it so well!
Each trooper was a badass and you being able to direct them to the spot where they would do the most damage and let them take it from there was a stroke of genius for gameplay!
They should do a “Rebel Commando” game and harvest all the Star Wars love flying around at the moment.