This gives me hope for Episode 3

As I alluded to in my previous post, I finished Star Wars: Republic Commando last night. I really enjoyed the game, although it was insanely short. I finished it in about 8-10 hours tops. I started it on late Friday and played most of Saturday. By that point I was 2/3rds of the way through. I did play a lot of WoW Sunday and Monday evenings which is why I didn't just finish off Republic Commando on Sunday.

Shortness aside, it was a lot of fun. It was a neat take on the Star Wars universe that didn't involve any lightsabers at all. Just lots of down and dirty squad-based fighting. I loved the squad AI and command system too. I've always liked games like Rainbow Six from a distance, as I just get too twitchy when I play them and end up killing my whole squad. Republic Commando had an awesome command interface for directing your squad to do their various duties and the fact that the other 3 members of Delta Squad actually could make decisions for themselves helped reduce frustration.

Pretty much, if you direct them to stand near a bacta tank and they're injured, they'll heal themselves on their own without you telling them too. Same with their various movements during a firefight, etc.

The only thing that was kind of annoying was that if you directed someone to plant a demolition charge or hack a terminal, it wouldn't default to the squad member that actually had specialization in that area. So I'd have my sniper hacking a mainframe while my hacker planted demo charges and my demo guy sniped. It was kind of annoying, but ultimately didn't matter that much.

The game has the coolest helmet cleaner ever. You get rain and blood and goop on your visor and this nifty energy wiper cleans it off. Little touches like that make the game neat.

I'm hoping that Episode 3 actually is going to be as cool as the trailer and the teasers in this game make it look. The game ends with the invasion of Kashyyyk (home of the wookies, for those in the know) by the Republic forces, which looks really cool. That, and Greivous looks neat and I can't wait to see the bodyguard robots in the movie. The game also really makes you hate the Geonosians. Man, I hate them.