There is not much I can say that other people have not already mentioned. Yes, this is a Star Wars themed fps set during the clone wars. No, it is not a revolutionary fps and plays quite typical to corridor shooters of the past, but with an emphasis on teamwork. The A.I is not smart and always requires further placement behind cover. As opposed to Brothers in Arms, whose A.I was quite intelligent, Republic Commando felt more like a chore having to babysit your clone troopers. Very little in the form of self preservation on account of the bad A.I, you are constantly telling them what to do and where to go. Headshots and grenades are a must on higher difficulty, but a lot of gunfights devolve to spray and pray tactics because the npc's take an incredible amount of ammo to kill, an upwards of 12 to 15 rounds sometimes. Ammo caches are placed sparingly around the maps, so expect to be pulling out your weak pistol to dispatch enemies every so often. There is a big difference between frustrating gameplay and challenging gameplay, unfortunately this game falls more towards the former. However, I quite enjoyed the graphical fidelity and detailed textures/ character models. No performance issues or crashing on my MBP utilizing Wine. If you must, grab it while its on sale.
I dont have the most recent system, an intel hd4000 mid 2012 mbp utilizing a virtual machine (Wine), but I can run Saints Row 3 on medium settings with little to no hitch in performance, also purchased on gog. Saints Row 2 was released back in 2008 and we still have the same terrible console port which struggles on any modern or mid range system released years after the fact. GTA IV, which was also a terrible port and utilizes countless assets, performs better on my outdated mbp, now that's just sad. Considering this game is graphically ugly and doesn't use a lot of assets, I'm kind of lost on how it still performs poorly. Is it really necessary to make an ugly game even worse by lowering the graphics and resolution to the lowest denominator and still not getting the input and performance over 10fps? If you have a beast of a system you might have a shot, but in the state this game was released back in 2008 and even today on gog, it is unplayable. The most recent game in my catalogue, Shadow of Mordor, even performs over 25 fps.
I was nine when this game originally released and I remember playing this along with thief 2. So i didn't hesitate to opt in when Gog was offering it up without asking for a dime. Having installed it through a clean wine prefix on my 08mbp, I can say this game runs very well playing with all three characters. Sure the difficulty and lack of multiple saves can be unforgiving, but whats the fun in breezing through a game as quick as you can? There is a lot of variety with the campaigns as well, be it impaling space marines heads with predators crossbow or blasting xenomorphs with the assault rifle. Now i can finally play the marine campaign without shi**ing my pants in fear.
