Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II

"An amazing and impressive game, for a week anyway."

Rogue Leader, one of the first GameCube games and really the only one that grabbed peoples' attention at launch. It arrived over two years after Rogue Squadron on the Nintendo 64 and follows the same structure as its predecessor. Fly for the Rebel Alliance through a series of missions, earning medals awarded on how good your performance is. The first major difference between Rogue Leader and the first of the series is the introduction of missions in space, the most impressive of which is a very faithful recreation of the Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi. Another major difference is the DVD like special features on the disc - a documentary, commentary for each level, galleries and more. The last being limited control over your co-pilots this time, even if it remains as ineffectual as shouting at them from your seat. Aside from that, though, it's very much the same old thing - fly around in a variety of craft, destroy wave after wave of TIEs, rescue hapless Rebel ships, partake in battles seen in the movies, yell at your co-pilots for being inept and, if you're a geek, do your own running commentary in your best (but still awful) Yoda impression.

If you're familiar with Star Wars, you'll want to know what missions you can do and what you can pilot. This entry of the series includes the four stalwart crafts - X-Wing, A-Wing, Y-Wing and Snowspeeder - and now adds the B-Wing thanks to the inclusion of space missions. There are plenty of other craft in the game, one mission has you stealing a TIE Fighter and then a Lambda class Imperial Shuttle, but most of the rest are secret and to be earned via the missions. 15 craft in all and each with their own good and bad points. The weapon and shield upgrades are back, the always handy radar too. A neat new inclusion is a training level on a compacted version of Tatooine where you fly Luke's T-16 Skyhopper around and get to know the basics of flying, exploring and attacking. It also showcases another new feature - real-time planet based levels. Play at night and in the game the stars will be out, play midday and the sun is out, play in the evening and you're treated to a sunset. It doesn't work for all planet based missions though, just a few, but it's a welcome feature all the same.

The sound in Rogue Leader is wonderful at all times; the music, the speech, the sound effects.. all very impressive. You get all the typical sounds - blasters, TIE fighter ion engines, explosions, low rumbling sound from the capital ships - along with speech from co-pilots and characters (Denis Lawson even reprises his role as Wedge Antilles). It's all there, all in crystal clear audio. The music isn't ever in question in Star Wars games, you'll know the tunes before turning the GameCube on. So how is the quality and how much music is there? Great and seemingly endless, are the answers. The music arrangements composed for the first game are all here, sounding better than ever, with hours of music taken from the movies along with it. I can't back this up but I'd bet that it's the longest soundtrack for any GameCube game so far. But if you didn't like the music in the movies then you don't need a review to know you won't like the music in the game. Those who do like it though will be treated to hours of orchestral music from the movies and original orchestral music made for the game which compares favourably.

It's been out for over two years now and the it's still one of the most amazing looking games around. It's by far the highpoint and the biggest attraction, to fans and non-fans of Star Wars alike. You're even treated to numerous clips from the movies in the backgrounds of each menu, all in perfect visual quality. The cut-scenes are themselves very good imitations of certain scenes from the movies which, when added to the familiar fanfares blasting from your speakers, makes it a very atmospheric experience. There are no serious frame-rate issues at all and on the rare occasion that it does drop below 60fps it's still barely noticeable. Everything moves around the screen smoothly and quickly, even with dozens of fighters and other ships on screen at once the game is impressively fluid. Each model looks awesome, and though Factor 5 admitted to cutting back on the numbers of polygons used to keep the frame-rate up, the whole game is highly detailed. The GameCube has no problem filling your screen with a Star Destroyer and blanket laser fire from all directions, explosions and debris everywhere. The only negative thing I can find with the graphics in Rogue Leader are that they take up memory that could have been used for more missions. So praise all round for how it looks: good presentation, awe inspiring graphics (especially on the Kothlis mission, best sunset in any game ever), technically good too. It is the closest to being a pilot in Star Wars that you can get thanks to the graphics and sound combined, for now.

One thing I don't like much is how unconnected the missions are. In Rogue Squadron you were up against a Moff and each mission was a logical step from the last, whereas in Rogue Leader a few missions are connected with the rest being made up of stand-alone missions or scenes from the original Trilogy. A coherent and continuing story would have done a lot for this game. The missions themselves are still good though. Right away you're attacking the first Death Star, making the infamous Trench Run (again), then it's onto some very visually impressive missions before taking part in the infamous Battle of Hoth (again), another bunch of visually impressive missions later and you're taking on the second Death Star (again). What's that familiarity I'm getting, the feeling that I've done all this before? Yeah. Rogue Leader has little originality. Hoth has been seen in the original arcade TESB, Rebel Assault, Shadows of the Empire, Rogue Squadron, Super TESB. The Trench Run has been seen in the original SW arcade game, Super Star Wars, Star Wars (NES and SMS), 32X SW arcade, Rogue Squadron, and I'm sure others. The attack on the second Death Star was in Super ROTJ and the original ROTJ arcade game, possibly more. Yes they're classic scenes, but I'm tired of them being dragged out for another game with just graphical enhancements and the bloated more-TIEs-on-screen-at-once factor. The planet based missions aren't very original either, taking heavily from Rogue Squadron, but if you enjoyed them then you'll still enjoy them now.. just not for as long.

The game has a steep learning curve and it will put some people off. I don't just mean gaining medals in each level to earn secrets but just completing the level at all. It's not often that you'll fail by dying though, too many missions require you to keep someone or something alive for a long period of time while surviving an onslaught of Imperial attacks. Maybe it's commendable that the game is hard, not many games require much effort and bouncing back from failure after failure, but when there's no adjusting the difficulty to your skills then it's a bad point. The first game was easy enough for anyone to get far in, with more experienced gamers still having the medals to aim for once reaching the final mission. Not so in Rogue Leader. The missions alone are hard and getting those Gold medals is a nightmare unless you're prepared to put all of your spare hours into it, too much reliance on luck and not enough on skill. You'll get to see all the game offers within a week or two, it just won't be a walk in the park.

Time to split the recommendations up: if you have Rogue Squadron and have played a lot of Star Wars games in the past, then I say rent this only. Get this game for a week, see the best it offers and return it knowing it would have gotten old quickly had you kept it longer. On the flip side, if you're new to these games and are desperate for a tough challenge in a GameCube action game, then go and buy this now.
A visually awesome game with not enough substance to keep my attention after just one week. If only it had carried over the depth that Rogue Squadron offered and had more original missions, which don't quickly become a chore, then this would have been a classic game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/22/03