Ah, the beloved Stormtroopers: cannon fodder and comic relief of the Star Wars universe, unable to hit the broadside of a bantha from a metre away. If not for their crappy aim and lack of tactical smarts, our hero Luke Skywalker would have been ventilated by blaster fire a thousand times over.
But it was not always so. The dull and soulless Star Wars prequel movies have told us that the precursor to the Imperial Stormtroopers were the Republic Clone Troopers, a vast army of soldiers who share DNA with Boba Fett's dad. Or something like that.
Honestly, I stopped caring about Star Wars about halfway through The Phantom Menace. Jar-Jar Binks, Snoopy-headed robots and Darth Vader as a "yippee!" squealing, snot-nosed brat were too much to bear.
Luckily, George Lucas's desire to destroy his entire Star Wars legacy doesn't seem to have trickled down to the video game side of things, especially lately. The most recent instalment in LucasArts' gaming pantheon is Star Wars Republic Commando, a blending of Rainbow Six-style squad-based tactics with the running and gunning of Halo.
But in trying to make the tactical shooter sub-genre more accessible to casual gamers, the LucasArts gang has oversimplified it to the point where Republic Commando feels like a straight-up shooter with a few extra elements tacked on. It looks great and plays well but, other than the Star Wars setting, there's nothing revolutionary about it.
The game puts you in the battle armour of Delta 38, leader of a four-man squad of Clone Trooper commandos. The 14-mission campaign, set between the events of Episode II and Episode III, is spread across three worlds, including Chewbacca's home planet of Kashyyyk. Which, you may recall, was featured in 1978's Star Wars Holiday Special. Along with Bea Arthur, Jefferson Starship and a mini-Chewbacca named Lumpy. I truly wish I was kidding.
While your weapon's context-sensitive crosshairs make issuing orders to your squadmates simple, it has its drawbacks. For one, you can only order your men to breach doors, take up sniping positions and whatnot at predetermined hot spots that are marked by holographic images of the action in question, which sort of limits your tactical creativity.
On top of that, when several objects in the environment are popping up as a context-sensitive hologram as you move your crosshairs over them, intense firefights can get really cluttered and confusing. The limited field of view in your helmet's heads-up display doesn't help this, either.
So sometimes you'll accidentally order one of your guys to hack a computer when you actually wanted your squad to concentrate fire on the lethal Super Battle Droid next to it. Oops. I'll be right over with the resuscitator, dude.
Where Republic Commando gets it right is in making you feel like the leader of a squad of fellow soldiers, rather than a babysitter that has to protect his spastic troops from harm. The A.I. is aggressive and smart, and your wisecracking comrades in arms will save your hide as often as you do theirs.
The game's production values are also great, particularly in the audio department, though the lack of cinematics to break up the relentless pace makes it feel like one long firefight at times. And really, it isn't even that long - the single-player campaign can be completed in well under 10 hours, and online play is strictly death-match and capture-the-flag stuff. There's no option for co-operative play, either.
Republic Commando might not do much to challenge the dominance of the Rainbow Six and Halo franchises that seem to have inspired it, but it's a solid shooter that action-game fans with a soft spot for Star Wars will enjoy, albeit briefly.
And, if nothing else, it's way better than watching your bootleg copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special again. Even if they did edit out Bea Arthur's nude scene.
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BOTTOMLINE
Intense action and great production values can't quite elevate this tactical shooter that's heavy on the shooting but light on tactics.
