Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike

"Impressive AND Blah"

Aside for the Jedi Knight series on PC, the Rogue Squadron games have consistently delighted fans of the movies more than most other Star Wars games. In fact, the majority of games using the license are mediocre or poor. However, the quality of the predecessors to Rebel Strike made me purchase this game before reading a review, or hearing an opinion from a friend. Was this blind purchase a wise move, or rather a waste of money? It was actually both in that this game is actually two games in one.

Gameplay: First the good. The flight stages are as good as we have come to expect from the series. They are fast and frantic and you will be required to switch between your laser, ion cannons, and missiles. There are TIE fighters galore, and a capital ship and space stations to assault as well. My two personal favorite stages are the mission in the Geonosis asteroids and the assault on the Super Star Destroyer Executor. The Geonosis mission puts you in a decrepit old Jedi fighter and forces you to take out some Imperial gunships hiding in the asteroids. The Jedi fighter comes with the sonic missiles from Episode 2, and the resulting detonation results in what is probably my favorite sound effect of all time. As for the Executor mission, if you liked the attack on the Star Destroyer in the second game, you wont be disappointed here. Otherwise, the rest of the fighter-based missions are of the same high quality as the earlier Rogue games. The only problem I had with the fighter missions is that they seemed rather short, but what’s there is definitely gold.

The biggest “innovation” (or rather excuse for innovation) in Rebel Strike are the walking around bits. These segments are truly horrible, comparable in my opinion to the shoddy old Rebel Assault games. Anyone who says that these stages are anything besides annoying, contrived, and poorly executed is a fanboy liar. The reasons for this are simple. Targeting is terrible. You don’t lock onto a target, instead your supposed to generally face them and shoot. You will get a little green target to tell you your aiming at them, but it can take a while to line up your shot, and when you do your target probably moved already. Secondly, the camera is completely useless; it moves slower than a geriatric BM. By far the worst parts are the platform jumping bits. The collision detection is extremely miscalibrated. Case in point, there is one point where you train with Yoda and he forces you to jump across floating rocks that rise and fall. If you try to jump where the rock is, you will get caught on an invisible barrier and fall into the drink. Instead you must overshoot the rock, but unfortunately, the distance varies by rock. All in all, these segments almost make you forget how good the core dogfighting segments of the game are, that is until you go back to them.

Story: Not that much to the story. Some of the missions are new, and some are verbatim repeats of stuff seen in the movies. The video clips are nice, but it would have been better if it were possible to skip through them the first time. The clips do make the wait for a DVD version of the movies that much harder.

Graphics/Sound: Both are excellent. Textures are incredible, models are well done, and animation is on target. Chances are you wont be disappointed with the graphics. As for the sound, the developers have done a great job here as well. All the sound effects are perfectly captured (including my aforementioned sonic charge) and are indistinguishable from those in the films. The voice acting overall is good, with some of it being pulled from the films, and some being recorded by voice actors. The only characters voice I had a real problem with was Han’s.

Play Time/Replayability: Rebel Strike is well balanced in terms of difficulty. Chances are you will have to replay a few levels a couple of times in order to figure out exactly what to do, however this repetition is rarely annoying. In terms of replayability, there are lots of ships, weapon upgrades, and levels to unlock as well as the medals to earn on the stages themselves. Add to this multiplayer and a coop version of RS2 and you’ve got quite a lot of game to play.

Final Thoughts: This game is another fine addition to the Rogue Squadron family, but I must say it is the weakest of the three. This is solely due to the exceptionally not fun walking missions. Had these not been implemented in to the game, I would have certainly scored this game a 9 or 9.5/10. As they are in the game and must be completed, I cannot honestly give the game more than a 7/10 as they are just not enjoyable in the least. In the end, you will not regret making this purchase, but you will have to slog through some monotonous levels. Keeping that in mind, you might just want to wait till the codes come out so you can just skip the filler run around levels.

P.S. The games 70’s themed intro made me smile and chuckle. I think most everyone will get a kick out of it…

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/27/03