Geonosian Elite Laser

The dreaded Geonosian Elites wield this weapon with great effectiveness against your commandos. Luckily, when they die, they'll drop it, allowing you to snatch it and use it for your own nefarious purposes. Anyone who's familiar with Quake's lightning gun or Halo 2's beam gun should be familiar with the basics here; if you hold down the fire button, a laser beam will shoot out of the end of the weapon, allowing you to light up foes until the ammo runs out. It deals a terrific amount of damage on organic foes, but has limited effectiveness against droids, and requires a lengthy charge-up period when first fired before it actually shoots. Given the relative rarity of Elites, you won't be seeing this weapon very often, so if you like it, use it whenever you have a chance.

LS-150 Heavy Repeater

The favored weapon of the Trandoshan HAM, the Heavy Repeater is essentially Republic Commando's analogy for the M-60 machine gun that appears in many other FPS's. Although individual rounds do only light damage, the HP makes up for this by putting a lot of them in the air. It packs decent accuracy for its power, but you do run through ammo quite quickly when you hold down the button, it has a lengthy reload time, and it's almost useless against droids. Still, against Trando mercs and slavers, you're not going to find a more effective means of crowd control.

ACP Array Gun

The favored gun of the Trandoshan slavers is the APC Array Gun, a shotgunesque creation that fires multiple pellets at its target. Most FPS shotguns are fairly similar, in that they're devestating at close range, but lack the accuracy required to kill at long range. The Array Gun has the weakness, but doesn't pack enough of a punch to really make up for it; you really do have to be standing right next to your target in order to get a one-shot kill with this weapon, thanks to the horrifically large spread of the pellets. That said, there's plentiful ammo for it, so in dire straights you might want to use it to off weaker enemies to preserve ammo for your blaster rifle.

Trandoshan SMG

Although the Trandoshan mercenaries are fiercesome foes, their SMGs leave a lot to be desired, which is probably why you're going to be slaughtering Trandos by the bushel whenever you encounter them. Although it holds a good amount of ammo (160 rounds altogether), the SMG is woefully inaccurate and isn't very powerful when its fire does land on a foe. Although it's an acceptable weapon when used in close combat against organic foes, you'll almost have to be in melee range before your shots consistently hit, begging the question of why you wouldn't just use your melee attack for the instant kill. To its credit, Trando mercs will be your primary foes for long stretches of the game, meaning that you'll have plenty of ammo for the SMG, should you like to keep it by your side.

Wookiee Rocket Launcher

Although bulky and cumbersome, the Wookiee rocket launcher doesn't quite make up for this with utility. Sure, it's powerful, but is usually going to be too unwieldy to be of much use to you.

Although this is called a rocket launcher, it's actually a homing rocket launcher; when you press the button, nothing will happen until you release it. If you haven't locked on to a target (by floating the targeting cursor over something), a single rocket will dummy-fire straight ahead, resulting in a large explosion wherever you were aiming. If you do manage to lock on to something, though, you can continue to hold down the button to shift more rockets into position before releasing the button, allowing you to shoot multiple projectiles at one time.

The drawbacks to the WRL, though, are pretty severe. For one thing, it's slow to fire, especially if you want to queue up multiple rockets. While this isn't a big deal on lower difficulty levels, on hard mode it's a big liability, as you'll need to stay within sight of your target before you can lock on, which will let them take free aim at you. For another thing, the enemies you'll most want to use homing rockets on are aerial foes, like Geonosian Elites and Grievous' bodyguard (when they jump), but these are paradoxically the most difficult to hit with the rockets; when you fire at something in midair, your rockets will often get caught in orbit around the target, and will continue to revolve around it until it moves and they can finally hit it. What's more is that it's not even as powerful as the anti-armor attachment in all circumstances; an SBD, for instance, can survive a direct hit with a rocket, whereas a single AA round will knock it out.

Granted, its power does make the WRL a nice sidearm to pack, especially since there are so few weapons that come anywhere close to the anti-armor attachment's power level when dealing with armored foes (and although the WRL isn't quite there, it is at least in the ballpark). It's also worth nothing that the ability to send out multiple projectiles at once can be quite handy when used against slow-moving enemies, especially the Spider Droids that you'll frequently encounter in the late stages of the game. A full load of four or five rockets, fired simultaneously, will be enough to instantly kill a Spider Droid, or at least reduce its health to the point where your team can kill it quickly.