Your Squadĭespite being faceless clones of each other, the devs put a ton of time into giving each of your squad mates a unique personality and memorable appearance. It’s a visceral experience that brings the combat to life around your squad. When you brutally murder something close-up, your visor gets splashed with blood/oil for a second before a self-cleaning wiper restores your vision. The campaigns are full of memorable set pieces and the ambient/battle music dynamically changes to suit what’s happening in-game.
The controls are crisp, the sound design and lighting are immersive, and there’s a surprisingly-high emphasis on environmental storytelling. The first thing you’ll notice while playing through is how modern the game feels. That problem goes away once the game starts. Also don’t be scared off by the mouse having insane sensitivity in the main menu. If you’re willing to install HD/widescreen/first-person legs/QoL mods, you’ll definitely appreciate it, but I didn’t and still had a blast with the game unmodded. Now that I’ve played it, I can 100% see what all the hype was about. But I’d actually never played Republic Commando until this year, despite knowing it was another iconic Star Wars shooter from the same era. It probably still ranks in my top 3 games of all time. Growing up, I loved Star Wars Battlefront II and its predecessor.
