3/5 ★ – jordybgood's review of Star Wars: Republic Commando.

Really interesting concept, really weird execution. Republic Commando was one of those games I always wanted to play as a kid but didn’t have an Xbox, and then once I got around to getting one, it was nearly impossible to find for a decent price, at least at that age anyway. Thankfully Aspyr has made a port for the PlayStation consoles and I got to experience it. I’m like 50/50 on it right now because I genuinely think this is a solid game with great ideas, but I’m also wondering if it was just tooooo hard for its own good? Like granted the point of each section is to test your tactical knowledge, can you command your squad, and can you work alone when you have no help. It’s an interesting approach to the FPS genre and it makes it stand out from Cod or BF because of how much involved you’re in with your friendly ai. I just wish the ai was actually smart enough to work these ideas because damn there were some real broken mechanics. Not to mention the enemy damage was extremely high for no real retaliation options. Even on the easy difficultly the Kashyyk mission felt like the Souls level of “go f yourself” bc of how overwhelming the damage output would be. Its possible you could reboot this into something genius, clean up the ai, make more level and enemy designs, make combat more visceral and give more gun options, you got a solid Star Wars fps right there. There’s even potential for a really compelling story about brotherhood and the philosophy conflict of military and ethics of war in the Republic. It wants to go to those places but doesn’t really have the time to unfold all those ideas. A remake could fix this, but I doubt Disney would wanna pursue an M rated game these days but we’ll see!