*review coming from a long time veteran of this type of game, with 20 thousands hours+ on both Total War games, Crusadesr Kings 3, and others. (TW and CK hereafter for short) i get the impression that this game wanted to be something a little in between TW and CK, which is not a bad idea at all, but failed, and ended up instead being something that combines the worst aspects of both franchises into a single game, with none of the good parts... it's not a dumpster fire or anything, in fact, there isn't anything particularily awful about it, but it just feel so, so dull and lame... this game could have been good in early 2000's but nowadays? you get none of the cool playable real time battles and army composition strategy that are TW's focus, and also none of the kingdom management, vassal politics, and character roleplaying that are CK's focus. instead, it seems like their main focus here is...to try to play SimCity in a Total War campaign map (?) at least, that's what i'm guessing, because seriously, i have never seen a grand strategy game with a building roaster so bloated and inflated as this, and other aspacts of the game seems a secondary focus at most. there is like 25 buildings for agriculture, 25 others for fortification, 30+ for recruiting, and as many for religion, authority, economy, ressources, etc etc... and yes... you guessed it... Most of those buildings are either useless or redundant because they all overlap each other in what they do. having more choices doesn't nessesarily equals more strategies or deeper gameplay, in this case, i feel it just creates bloat: complexity, only for the sake of complexity. There are some great ideas that i like a lot too (like how the population in each region is represented according to the different castes of medieval society and you can set a % of each group to work different task as neeeded, and change that each turn, that's very cool and nifty actually)...but that's not enough to save my interest the game.
''The Squad is your Weapon.'' Republic Commando is a well made FPS that manage to be very atmospheric and immersive thanks to good soundtrack, voice acting, mission design, and game mechanics. The only significant problem i have with it, is that i feel like it ended a bit soon (because i was having fun!). One of te most unique and underrated Star Wars game. I loved it on my Xbox back in the day, replayed it recently from GOG to see if it held up after 20 years... and yes, it mostly does. +Pros: *interesting and intuitive squad tactics mechanic, all done trough 4 simple order buttons and 1 interaction button. Easy to use, yet feels like there is depth and requires thinking in how and where to place your squad to create kill zones, or so as to cover every angle when defending, cover yourself when advancing, etc... Surprisingly rather good AI for your squad members (especially for a 2004 game). They usually don't derp around much, they do what you expect, you feel like you can rely on them. *Very atmospheric and immersive, feels like you've never really seen the star wars universe in this way before. The 3 squad members have a surprising amount of personality for being all clones, and you feel attached to them by the end. They have good VA, and just enough friendly trash talk with each other to be fun, but not to much so as to be annoying or break the atmosphere. The tone is more dark and serious than what you're used to from most other star wars media. *is actually challenging on Hard mode. (i recommand to play it on hard since it absolutely requires you to use the squad as your main weapon, and work as a team, which i felt was more fun and interesting to play this way). -Cons: *A little short. 7-10 hours depending on how much you die. There is minimal replayability once the campaign is done. The multiplayer was good back then, but nobody plays it anymore obviously. *Over-reliance on endlessly-spawning enemie in some places can feel a bit cheap and frustrating.
Pretty much what the review title says. Never reached the start menu even once. the error message i get is an utterly bizarre: ''rdroid_gnome release build has stopped working.'' which i have never seen anything like this before and is not helpful at all to troubleshoot. other users recommend to set the resolution via the separate options program before starting, and i'm like... what separate options program? i open the game floder, there is nothing in it that ressemble an out-of-game options setup, nor any .txt file that could allow me to manually enter the resolution so where is it? is it the SWEP1RCR.EXE or the SysCheck.exe ? because both of those crash on launch everytime just like the game for me... i'm not too mad because i bought this on deep sale for less than 4$ but still, seriously GOG should not sell this and pull this from store. i'm not even asking for a refund it's just for the sake of principle and so other people don't get disappointed like me in the future. because by the looks of other reviews i'm not the only one that cannot run it at all.
