The whole “squad-based tactical action shooter” approach has been tried with numerous games over the years, always with mixed success. The well-known Rainbow Six series has revolved almost exclusively around mission planning and extensive squad-based action, but the “man-train formation” AI tends to result in team massacres when encountering unexpected trouble around a corner or behind a door. An obscure little game by the name of “Project Eden” involved using four team mates to solve puzzles and progress through the game in a co-operative manner, but the functionality for controlling these team mates was incredibly limited, forcing a lot of micromanagement and hand-holding. Hidden & Dangerous 2 and Operation: Flashpoint offer huge functionality for adjusting AI behavior and positioning, but this also makes them somewhat awkward and clumsy. Even Half-Life 2 has a limited amount of implemented squad control, but this method lacks precision and flexibility, and is mainly used as a novelty to ensure the player’s team mates are never in his way. Sick of shoddy AI scripting and poorly-implemented interface and control elements, I’ve been looking forward to Star Wars: Republic Commando with the hopes that it would implement squad control in such a manner that it was both easy to use and flexible enough to keep the action interesting, fun, and demanding of creativity on behalf of the player, and now that a playable demo of the PC version of the game has slipped onto the internet, I’ve had a chance to hammer this sucker into the ground and get a feel for how the game is going to turn out upon release a month from now. Let’s take a look at how Pandemic Studios’ latest entry into the squad-action market holds up under my intense, jaded scrutiny.

This brief demo takes place on the tree-littered planet of Kashyyyk – yes, the home of the Wookies. Trandoshan slavers using Seperatist weapons have moved in on the planet and started up a slave-trade operation, causing a cry for help to be unleashed which reaches the ears of the Republic, who respond by deploying a commando team to go in, trash the slavers, and rescue one of the Wookie leaders. The demo opens up with a holographic briefing from your clone advisor as he brings you up to date on the situation while your dropship descends through the thick jungle, and then, following a brief rope insertion, the action begins. The objective of the mission is to make a covert assault on the Trandoshan facility and try to rescue the Wookies and their leader, a task that naturally hardly goes to plan. I’ll leave the exact details of what occurs in the demo for you to discover, but here’s an overview of what to expect.

The first thing I took away from playing the demo is that the experience is heavily centered around your three squad-mates as much as yourself, as evidenced by the fact that my flimsy character was unable to take much punishment before going down. Each commando’s battle armor comes equipped with a rechargeable shield (I already hear moronic fanboys crying “HALO RIPOFF” over this), but once it’s breached – and it doesn’t take much damage at all to do so – it’s only a matter of a couple of good hits to bring your health down to zero. Fortunately, the development team decided to leverage some mercy into what could have been an extremely difficult game by implementing a resuscitation system that kicks into place when a commando goes down. Once he enters an “incapacitated” state (this applies to either the player, or his three subordinates), he’s basically stick looking helplessly at the action until someone can come over and use an emergency kit to revive him, supplying him with a couple of bars of health and putting him back into the fight. Basically this means that the mission isn’t a failure unless the entire team is rendered incapable of fighting, something which adds quite a bit of novelty to the action (and also made me even more dependant on the AI to come and help me every time I stepped on a grenade). It’s also worth mentioning that the AI will typically continue their previous orders and try to secure the area before running over to help you, but there is a command that can be issued to get your commandos to drop everything and run over to save your ass while putting themselves at vastly increased risk – a nice advance move by the developers to alleviate what could have been a big complaint against the AI, and offers a little more hands-on control.

And what of the AI, and the control system used to herd them around? Undeniably one of the most important elements of Republic Commando, the AI as presented in the demo is something of a mixed bag that ultimately left me with a positive opinion of their capabilities, but also the feeling that a lot more work still needs to be done in terms of pathfinding, reaction choices, and their general ability to act like real commandos rather than scripted NPCs, or at least give the appearance of such. First, let me say that the demo did a good job of showing the level of control players are given over their squad during the game, but at the same time, also raised some concerns of mine. Rather than implement a clumsy control system that involves moving people around by a series of waypoints or direct, incredibly specific commands, the game instead relies on heavy scripting to automate as many tasks as possible. For the most part, your fellow commandos will follow your lead, fire back if attacked, dodge grenades (or even throw them back, if they can), and seek cover wherever possible, and they’ll also automatically heal themselves up at Bacta terminals or revive fallen team members whenever possible. However, when a situation arises where the default squad behavior settings simply aren’t getting the job done, additional orders can be issued to get the player’s squad to behave differently. Getting the most use from me were the F1-F4 control functions, which issued global deployment orders to my entire squad; F1 is the generic “Search & Destroy” order, which causes your squad to take point and automatically attack as necessary, while F2, “Form Up” orders your squad to follow your head. F3 will cause a marker to appear on the plot of land you’re pointing at that your squad will rally around and try to keep secure, while F4 will finally order them to drop everything they’re doing (manning a turret, laying down sniper fire, etc) and fall back to their previous orders. Fairly straightforward and easy to use, but not exactly flexible for gameplay purposes.

Fortunately, squad control goes a little further. Each member of the player’s squad has a different specialty – “Fixer” is the standard technical guy that hacks computer terminals and handles engineering tasks, “Scorch” is the resident demolitions and heavy weapons expert, and “Sev” is the cold, calculating sniper specializing in planting a round into an alien’s gonads from several kilometers away. All of this is important because the game offers numerous sequences that allow the observant player to place his squad into positions that allow them to take full advantage of their skills, and the demo shows off quite a number of these sequences. At certain strategic points on the map, “hot spots” have been placed that allow your squad to take up position and perform a certain maneuver, the order of which can be issued or cancelled simply by pointing at the hot spot in question and hitting the use key. These can be something as simple as ordering a door breach or computer hack to more advanced commands, like telling Scorch to take up position behind a group of crates (yay, crates!) and lay down a barrage of grenades, or having someone man a turret.

Why am I disappointed? Because all of the above commands led me to believe that the game would be somewhat non-linear in nature, allowing for a large number of approaches to different situations, but sadly, this isn’t the case at all. While the terrain hot-spots allowed me a few options in how I tackled a given situation (indeed, subsequent playthroughs of the demo revealed a number of different approaches I hadn’t considered at first), but these options eventually turned out feeling almost like static “power ups” that vastly increased my combat effectiveness, but only for a specific scripted set of events, and eventually it got to the point that I could predict how a battle would go just by the placement of the hot-spot areas. Don’t get me wrong, it felt incredibly cool and immersive running through the demo the first time issuing orders and seeing my squad go to work, but once I realized how linear and pre-planned this system truly was (it seemed like my commandos wouldn’t even use some of their special weapons if not specifically ordered into the relevant “hot spot” zone, such as their sniper rifles or grenade launchers), my experience suffered a little. I doubt it will be a problem for anybody running through the game for their very first time, but this is definitely a factor I feel will really hurt the game’s replayability in the long run. On top of all that, the AI had a few problems with getting hung up on each other or the terrain, not acting logically in combat (sometimes they’d make poor maneuvers or shoot endlessly into an obstacle), and had occasional difficulty carrying out orders in the way I would expect (such as when I would open a door, point through it, and hit F1 to issue a “Search & Destroy” order with the expectation that they would go on ahead and help clear the place out, but instead watched them hang back expectantly until I went through the door into the next “zone” first), and I hope that all these problems are resolved in time for the final game to be released. Of course, given my past experience with demo-to-retail bug ratios, I sincerely doubt any improvement of the sort will happen, but I can dream, can’t I?

Another important aspect I made sure to scrutinize while playing this demo is the graphics engine. Like any multi-platform project, the quality of the engine in Republic Commando is a rather big concern, as these kinds of projects typically tend to suffer from a poor presentation on the PC in one aspect or another as a clear carry-over to the game’s console-based cousin. And sadly, as evidenced by the relatively small maps and incredibly common (albeit thankfully brief) loading segments in the demo, Republic Commando has certainly seen some evident scaling down in favor of the Xbox port that the design team was unwilling or unable to work around when creating the PC version. Fortunately, an uncomfortably small level scale was the only real issue I’ve noticed so far, as everything else with the graphics engine looks very much up to par with what one can expect out of a modern game in terms of detail, special effects, and, most importantly, framerates, which consistently maintained a very high speed on my XP2500+/Radeon 9600 Pro /1GB RAM system on maximum detail. And there’s certainly quite a bit of detail to offer too – the commandos’ armor looks very ragged and battle-torn (with the relevant clone’s serial number imprinted on the back as a nice touch), the Trandoshan slavers have a grisly alien appearance to them, and the NPCs in general look quite impressive – though as a nitpicky complaint, the Wookies seem a little too large, and their animations sometimes looked jerky and disconnected. Perhaps my favorite thing about Republic Commando’s graphical style, however, is the “helmet visor” thing they have going. Basically a homage to Metroid Prime (though I’m sure not officially), the player’s view is always masked by the metallic edges of his helmet, with tactical information and health status shown on the displays in a very cool manner – and as an even neater nice touch, an enemy’s grisly death at close range will result in a bloody mess appearing on the player’s faceplate, obscuring his vision until a cool little energy beam sweeps by to clear up the mess. The same even applies when the player’s shield drops and he starts taking serious hits, as little cracks in the glass and pieces of debris suddenly form to augment the feeling of a serious impact being received. Of course, Pandemic had the foresight to make this entire visor system a toggle-able option, so the three of you people out there who aren’t interested in an immersive experience can still get their fun out of the game.

So, does this demo’s gross over-reliance on heavy scripting mean the full version of Republic Commando is doomed to failure? To be honest, no; games like Half-Life have proven that a linear sequence of scripted events is hardly a bad thing, but only if done properly, and the brief mission shown in this demo isn’t enough to determine that yet. However, thanks to the otherwise tight squad control system, intriguing storyline, excellent graphics, and incredibly cool HUD system, I’m certainly looking forward to seeing how Republic Commando’s final release fares on PC. The game is even expected to ship with a multiplayer component, although sadly there is no mention of co-op play, which I naturally find pretty disappointing. I believe this game has a huge degree of potential, but it still needs a good deal of development time and polish before it stands a chance of being a truly great title, rather than just a “pretty good” one, but I’ve got my fingers crossed in favor of the final release turning out well.