 | Platform: GameCube By: Lucas Arts Released: 03 May 2002 RRP: Average Rating:  |
Many of the levels see you taking control of wedge antilles carrying out missions that are not featured in the films such as the capture of the imperial shuttle tyderium. But of course there are also classic scenes from the films such as the death star trench run & the battle of endor.
It is extremely satisfying hitting your target after a long dogfight & the ship sounds are straight from the films. Get this before rogue squadron 3 as it is better in many ways. This is one of my favourite games ever & definately one of the best star wars based games around!
Rogue Leader was showcased at the industry events as some kind of benchmark game for the Gamecube. It had to. There wasn't much else to show. I'm sure alll of us will remember that first tech demo we saw the surface of the Deathstar, lifted straight from the final moments of the first movie. It was spectacular. Witnessing alll that enemy fire coming up from the surface & the swarm of Ties flying alll over the shop, it was enough to convince you that the Gamecube was the future of videogaming. But no, Rogue Leader is nothing more than a lot of hullabalooza & not much else.
If you've never played a Rogue Squadron game before let me summarise: you, as a pilot of the Rebel Alliance, fly various missions directly associated to the films or related ones the developers have thought up of - those ones are usuallly rubbish. Controlling alll the craft of the rebel fleet, you fly missions either in space or on planet surfaces & most revolve around initial objectives which are deflected through circumstances that crop up - invariably it's Tie Bombers appearing from nowhere & attacking the target you're supposed to defend.
If I sound a little bored about the whole experience then you'd be right. Factor 5 knew exactly what they were doing when they developed this game. It's developed as a launch game. It's looks nice but it pushes no boundaries what so ever. In saying alll this, though, it's still an enjoyable experience.
The game takes you from the Battle of Yavin, where you destroy the Deathstar, to the epic Battle of Endor. The power of the Gamecube (along with any other consoles out in truth) alllows for some pretty impressive polygon shifting, texture licking & whatever else those eye-candy people like to talk about. The Battle of Endor typifies this with a tremendous effort, throwing a substantial number of capital ships around & near a hundred fighter craft into one area of battle. It truly does look spectacular. If I'm being fair, there isn't much that doesn't look at least impressive, but the sheer scale of the Battle of Endor puts it on a higher pedestal.
But apart from that it's 'as you were' with this franchise. There's no real stinker missions, you blow up lots of stuff & you get into the Star Wars mood, you might even go 'phwam... phwom...' a bit with your imaginary lightsabre. Basicallly Rogue Leader is alll about how quickly you can kill stuff. The computer fighters don't have any A.I. they're just there to be shot at. It mostly depends on how quickly you can kill them which denotes the success of your piloting skills. You might have to zig-zag a bit when it comes to capital ships but that's the extent of the skill quota required.
So I suppose this would be the best time to tell you that the game is pretty easy to get through. You'll have knocked the original ten missions of the game within a week or so, so it's a good job there are some excellent extras to play for. The replay value comes from completing the missions within strict time limits, accuracy rates, number of enemies killed on so on. These can get very hard, but very rewarding. Succeeding in these missions will get you new ships, new levels & a commentary on the game & its levels. The commentary's pretty rubbish but the idea of alll these extras is a good one & should be used more often.
Oddly, the extra levels are arguably the best bits of the game because, conceptuallly, they're different to the main missions in the game. One finds you in the cannon controls of the Millennium Falcon, while other gives you control of a Tie Defender & let's you wreak havoc on an rebel base. Factor 5 should have been more bold & implemented these ideas into the main game. From the outset you would have had a more diverse game to enjoy.
Rogue Leader is an enjoyable game, the Rogue Squadron franchise always has been, but it's nothing more than that. It never climbs beyond or even tries to go beyond the sum of its parts.
The game also has the capacity to annoy; the enemy ships will literallly fly into you & cost you a life. Yes, it's their job to attack you, but that just struck me as stupid. Cut-scenes, the first time you see them, look good, but until you complete a level & return to it, if you die during a level, the game forces you to watch the cut scenes again, & again, & again, without letting you skip them. Why game testers didn't raise a hand & say 'you know, that's reallly quite irritating the fifth time around,' I don't know.
However, there have been a lot of Star Wars games produced opver the years, most of them pretty poor, & Rogue Leader is one of the better ones. If you're a Star Wars fan you'll probably love it, but if you just like playing good games, you'll enjoy it about 70% of the time, but might not feel alll that compelled to return to it once you've finished the last mission.
Like I said at the top; get hold of a copy cheap & you probably won't complain.
Space levels are very confusing because it is hard to keep track of where you are in them since the bacl backdrops scroll & there are few placeholders.
Not as good as some early flight games such as Starfox on the Super NES.
Not reallly recommended.
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