A tactical shooter that manages to entertain despite many obvious flaws.
This game does, unfortunately, force you to spend a lot of time ordering your squad around. However, when you are involved in heavy combat, you really see how intense the game can be. There will be droids and all kinds of enemies approaching from many different directions. On occasion, I've had to position my squad to cover one direction while I hold off the advance from another. This is particularly satisfying as Republic Commando has an excellent grenade mechanic. It brought me great glee to see a squad of nine droids dropped by a single grenade.
Aesthetically, this game is a mixed bag. The visuals are well designed for when the game was released and the view from the helmet really is intense. Blood or oil will splatter over your view and the helmet enacts and automatic cleaning device. This means that when you manage to stab an enemy up close, the splatter will blind you for a second. This, and the difficulty of scoring a hand-to-hand hit, make this aspect of the game particularly frustrating. The sound in the game, however, is fairly poor. Weapons fire mostly feels weak. Perhaps an active choice was to move the music away from the typical mighty sounding Star Wars music to music with a much more even tone. From a story perspective, this makes sense. You are not playing as a great hero but rather as one soldier amongst millions. For the same reason, the story is also fairly lacking. You are in battle and you are being order to destroy a building or some facility, and maybe even take down a turret. These are jobs given to commandos. Unfortunately, it does not make for a great story.
To add to the aural frustrations, Lucas Arts made a failed attempt at giving the members of your squad personality. While they will cheer you on for a particularly good shot or a clean kill with your knife, the comments are extremely repetitive and almost artificial. It is like they are trying to be funny and failing miserably - in that sort of uncomfortable silence that follows kind of way.
For the long list of negatives, it is difficult for me to describe why I still enjoy this game. I don't typically like shooters and this one has plenty of annoyances. However, there are many things right in the game. Many set-pieces were really well thought out. The game is fairly difficult but not in a way that makes me want to stop playing - rather just figure out how to succeed. While certain game mechanics are weak, the battles still feel intense. Finally, while the sound is almost annoyingly bad in all aspects - music, voice-acting, effects - it does bring together the feeling of chaos one expects of a commando unit dropped into the middle of a war zone. Oh, and I should mention again that the graphics are really good for a game this old.
For what this game is, it is entertaining. It's not going to be high drama. It's not going to be the most intense shooter. It is, however, a fun romp through a war as a soldier of the republic. Particularly since this game can be had today for ten bucks, I give it a definite recommend. You can easily provide yourself with entertainment for a weekend with it and thats about all I'd ask for from a ten dollar game. Of course, I would never have been willing o pay the original price tag, but I didn't play it then anyways.