Star Wars: Republic Commando tells the story of the an elite squad of commando Clone Troopers. The game begins at the battle of Geonosis portrayed at the end of the film Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. It provides sort a behind the scenes view of the battle as the squad makes it way deep into the droid foundries. Along the way the squad banters in a way fitting a World War II era squad with a modern dark sensibility. It's a very different way of telling a Star Wars story. It feels far more as a war movie than it does the fantasy adventure of Star Wars. There aren't any Jedi in this game. There isn't any mysticism of the Force. These things are irrelevant to a clone bred to be an elite soldier for the Republic. There isn't even an opening crawl. You're not viewing the game from the greater encompassing universe. You have no need for the whole story. In fact, once you're into the game itself at the beginning, you never leave AD-1138's first person view. The entire game is seen through the eyes of your character. There aren't any FMV scenes. No establishing shots of the levels. You see it as he sees it. There also isn't any why. You don't question your orders. You can't. Once you meet your objective on Geonosis, the game lets you know that it's now a year and two days later, and then informs you of why you're being deployed at the moment. Once you're done recovering a stolen capital ship taken from the Republic, you're once again moved ahead in time to roughly six months before the events of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith on Kashyyyk. You'll get a new mission objective and off you go. You're left with what amounts to a game without a story at all. The result will surely annoy a lot of people who play this game. This is actually the correct design choice in my opinion. It fits. It works. To paraphrase the classic line 'Ours is not to reason why, ours is to do or die'. The game therefore has to live on the strength of the combat itself. Does it? I'll answer that in my final opinion on the game...
Next time should cover online play.
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