Star Wars: Republic Commando: Order 66 Hands-On

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is the fulcrum of the entire series of movies; it captures the moment when the Republic turns into the Empire, the insurgents become the Rebel Alliance, and Anakin Skywalker puts on Darth Vader's mask. Star Wars: Republic Commando covers the breaking point of the old order--the cloned Republican army's purge of the Jedi Order--from the perspective of a three-man squad of Clone troopers. This overhead shooter packs plenty of straightforward assault action. It also features a simple tactical component: you can handpick your squad and control their formation. After marching through a few preview levels of Republic Commando, we can say that the concept holds a lot of promise.

Star Wars: Republic Commando consists of five levels. In each one, you run a long gauntlet of obstacles, barricades, and rebel fighters to reach a boss Jedi and assassinate him or her. That's right: your friendly Boba Fett look-alikes are in fact the bad guys, even if they're only following the Chancellor's orders. Before you start to carry out your perfidious missions, you customize your squad by choosing your three troopers from several different specialties. For example, standard troops have a long range and do medium damage, while heavy troops shoot less rapidly but deal more destruction. There are also grenade, shield, and spread-shot troopers to throw into the mix. And on the last level, you'll gain the services of Darth Vader and his devastating short-range attack.

You'll need to pick the right mix of soldiers for a particular level's threats. But the tactical fun doesn't end here. You can also switch your squad's formation around mid-battle to throw a different "look" at the enemy. The triangle, horizontal, and vertical formations all have different advantages and deficiencies, and you'll need to make clever use of all of them to keep your squad members alive. If they die, though, all is not lost; Republic commandos can revive their mates by standing close to them for a few seconds, almost like they do in the Xbox game. In case of real emergencies, you can also call in air strikes to level the playing field--literally.

We played the demo build of Republic Commando on an entry-level Motorola V300, which ran the game smoothly. The in-game graphics offered a pretty simple bird's-eye view of the action. All of the characters were tiny, but distinct, and the various environments recalled the settings of early 8-bit action games like Ikari Warriors. There wasn't much flash to the presentation, but it was easy to tell what was going on.

Star Wars: Republic Commando is already a lot of fun in its preview state, and unless something goes dramatically wrong in the next few months of development, we think that it'll be a great entry into the Star Wars collection and a fun action game in general. The game will be released on Cingular around August. Check back here for more details as they become available.