I'm late to the party, but still, it was a pretty cool party.

As the title indicates, I've completed my first play through of Republic Commando much later than the majority of people. It seems to have slipped from the hearts and the minds of it's many fans but that didn't stop me digging my copy out of the boxes in my garage and popping the disc. 
 
I'll be honest with you, that was the best decision I have made in a long while. Republic Commando offers a darker Star Wars experience that seems to defer from the typical "check me out I'm a wizard with a sword made of light" kind of formula that is found in many other Star Wars games. Republic Commando places you in the shoes of Delta-38, a clone commando in charge of a 4 man squad sent on three dangerous missions across the galaxy. 
  
While you're blasting droids and insect aliens away with your wide variety of weapons, you'll be followed around by Delta Squad which is made up of four people. The first, Delta-38 is the playable character and to be honest he doesn't have all that much personality. I feel this was probably intentional to try and make the player feel like they are Delta-38 and not tying him to any one personality. The other three members of Delta squad are Sev, Scorch and Fixer. The banter between these three characters will keep you entertained in throughout the game although it is moderately annoying when towards the end you hear the same thing that you have heard them say plenty of times already. Also, if you're a fan of Bioware games then you might be happy to know that the person who voices Scorch is the same person who voiced Kaiden in Mass Effect and Carth Onasi in KOTOR.    

 While you are cruising around the planets with your pals you can issue tactical commands to make your squad more effective. The "F" commands (F1 to F4) offer simple functions like Form Up, Cancel Orders, and Stand Ground whereas other, more advanced commands can only be issued at certain points such as make a sniper or heavy weapons position there or breach the door or hack the terminal. These commands are useful and fun at the beginning of the game, but towards the end become necessary for success.
 
There are only three missions in Republic Commando, but each one is a few hours long with multiple primary objectives and taking place in a fair few environments. The first mission on Geonosis has you killing flying bug aliens in an effort to assassinate their leader. After you deal with the leader, your primary mission is updated and you have to move through some tunnels to get to the main ship and disable it. You fight across 4 or 5 distinctly different environments throughout each level and while the enemies in a level are all similar, they are constantly introducing new ones to keep things fresh. While there is no real persistent story across all three missions, the general gist of it is that some people have seperated from the Republic (the good guys) and are using droids (robots) to "fuck shit up" across the galaxy.
 
The characters contribute to the quality of Republic Commando, but the immersion is what makes this game great. It has a similar HUD style to Metroid Prime where you can see the inside of the commandos helmet and all of the details are shaped to fit the helmet. On top of that, when you kill an enemy at close range or with melee, then you get a huge blood or goo splatter all over your screen which then has to be wiped off by a futuristic window-wiper like we see in today's cars. While this just seems like a little nifty feature to contribute to the immersion, it actually adds a tiny tactical element to the game as close range attacks are extremely powerful but losing visibility against a very strong enemy on a higher difficulty could prove fatal.   
 

 There is a wide variety of weapons and enemies in the game and new ones are constantly being introduced. All the weapons have appropriate situations but can be used to full capacity at any point. There is a weapon for just about any category such as a sniper, assault rifle, sub machine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, minigun, and pistol. The brilliant thing about these is that they share two distinct styles. Some of the weapons belong to the republic and thus have a clean, modern and futuristic look where as some of the more brutal weapons (Such as the shotgun) belong to the slavers and thus have a much more dirty, rusty and savage look about them. There is also a melee attack which is incredibly powerful but makes the enemies insides splatter all over your screen. Sometimes when I was faced with a lot of weaker enemies I would just run in and melee all of them. 
 
I did only give the game four stars which means there has to be some negative aspects, although they are very nitpicky and won't really bother anyone. The game has a strong focus on immersion which is brilliant, but the immersion is sort of broken when you realise how "gamey" everything feels. Sniper positions are conveniently placed when a stronger enemy is about to come and healing terminals are all over the walls, even on the inside of giant trees. If you can look past this then brilliant, but finding healing points in maintenance tunnels seems awfully strange.   

In conclusion, Star Wars Republic Commando is a brilliant contribution to the Star Wars Universe and although it is five years old it still stands up as a solid first person shooter with fun squad mechanics. If you're a Star Wars fan and you haven't already played this then pick it up immediately. If you're not a Star Wars fan but enjoy first person games like Rainbow Six or Halo, then you should definately go out and buy this game.