Star Wars Republic Commando is a game about a team of four soldiers on a mission to save the galaxy from evil separatists. If you are a Star Wars aficionado, you will be pleased to learn that the action takes place during the Clone Wars, and that all four are, yes, genetic copies of Jango Fett. This practically makes them Boba Fett's brothers. Boba Fett is wicked excellent. Woot.

If you are not a Star Wars aficionado, you will have no opinion about any of the preceding, but you will probably wonder why it is that, if the four soldiers all share the same DNA and all grew up in the same clone nursery, their voices and their temperaments and their skillsets are all so different. Why is one of them a grumpy musclebound thug and why is one a wimpy little jokester? And why why why is their leader, whom we spend the game controlling, the only one with that accent, which sounds a bit Australian and a bit South African and not at all like the sort of thing we would expect to find a long time ago in a galaxy far away?

You will have a bit of time to wonder about this but not too much, because shortly after you press "Start," bad guys will begin shooting at you and you will need to run for cover.

Republic Commando is all about shooting, with rayguns of every sort spitting hot plasma everywhere and attempting to roast us alive in our armoured clone-suits. As our four soldiers land on the planet Geonosis, mean robots (er, droids) attack from all sides, bathing us in blaster fire. We shoot back. The Geonosians (who are mean flying bugs and who also are the industrialists who run the robot factories) join in. We fall down and cannot get up.

Soon we learn that we are not simply a clone soldier with three computer controlled clone pals. We are a team, and we must think and act like a team. So when our team enters a long corridor full of convenient waist-high barriers, we tell one or two of our clone pals to hide behind them and take up sniper positions. They are excellent shots, and if we simply let them do their jobs, we can trust them to kill all the robots and clear out the hallway. Meanwhile, we and the remaining clone pal can be off to the side, hacking into the computer system that controls the door to the next room. As the bugs and the robots swarm all around us, we must raise our own raygun frequently, and we must occasionally do some sniping ourselves. Maybe 60 percent of the time we are yanking on the trigger and blowing the hell out of bad guys. The rest of the time we are more like project managers.

At its heart, Republic Commando is a game about delegation. Room full of enemy firepower? Send a couple of clone pals over to soften it up. One of the clone pals getting too brave for his own good? Pull him back and send him over to the health station on the wall, which will give him an injection of something nutritious and put the spring back in his step. One of the clone pals lying down in a fog of injury? Give him a jolt from your own armour suit and keep him close by, where maybe he'll be smart enough to avoid getting shot for a while. The exercise is like spinning plates; each clone pal needs regular attention, but in between bits of coaching we get plenty of time to show off our own rifle skills.

This part of the game is appealing and fun, at least at first. But as we leave Geonosis and tackle other missions, the charm begins to fade. Managing the team feels less and less like strategy and more like babysitting. We wonder if we are missing something.

Meanwhile, we notice that the frame rate is getting chuggy and making us feel sick, as if all these beautful animations never got properly tweaked and tuned. We begin to wonder if the game was rushed to market for the sake of the upcoming Star Wars Episode III movie. Then we remember that the fate of the galaxy lies with us and we better not go drifting off all cynical-like, lest we accidentally turn to the Dark Side. That happened to Darth Vader and now look at him.