Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike

"Good, but Needs more flying and less glitches..."

In this review, I’m going to start with the quick summary then proceed with the bad, and close with the good.

Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike is the sequel and, one might even say counterpart to RSII: Rogue Leader. Based on the original Rogue Squadron for the N64/PC, Leader was all about kicking imperial butt as you worked your way through about 20-odd missions, some new, some classic, all of which tied in with the major battles and events of the original Star Wars trilogy. Despite the fact that the developers re-wrote the game engine for this latest installment in the series, the fact is that this game looks and feels very much like its predecessor RSII. This is due largely to the fact that a big reason Lucas Arts made this game in the first place was that they wanted to take the basic RS formula and create a bunch of new missions that they never had time to do in the original. Speeder-bike races for example :)

However, while speeder-bikes are quite fun, the designers made what many consider to be a mistake in making the addition of ground-based missions to the game. Previously in the Rogue Squadron series, everything has been done from the cockpit, which was a good thing. Now they have attempted to change that formula by forcing you to spend a large portion of the game walking around and dealing with a very annoying camera that is the programmer’s attempt at “cinematic”. The fact is, you charge into a room full of storm troopers with guns a’blazin but when you turn around to get the ones you missed, you can’t see them except on your radar. You know why? Because the ‘cinematic’ camera isn’t turning around to face the target, and what’s worse still is the fact that you can’t do anything about it with the controller! The only thing you really can do is mash the ‘A’ button and hope you’re shooting it.. or you can walk backwards until the enemy is in front of you again. Also, there are a lot of glitches, like jumping until you get stuck in a corner and magically levitate with your knees crouched up! Some other more devastating glitches include things like the fact that when you do training mode with the audio commentary on, you cannot progress through the lessons because since non-commentary voice-overs are disabled, the game apparently cannot tell when you complete one! It’s like “press Z while running to roll” and you’ll roll but then nothing happens and the game continues to act as though it were still waiting for you to perform the extremely basic maneuver! Also, in the co-op mode (which consists entirely of enemy-swamped versions of the missions from Rogue Leader), at some points where you are told to change craft into a different starfighter, there is only one of that starfighter available for you or your friend to get into! The ‘switch craft’ symbol is still there, but if your friend flies into it after you’ve used it, he just hops into your old ship! Another problem with co-op is that the game has a tendency to become laggy with two player’s worth of enemies on the screen. There is really only one other thing wrong with this game, and that is the controls. As mentioned before, this game was in extremely desperate need of a camera-controlling feature for the on-foot missions. Sadly, the problems don’t stop on the planet surface. The game’s auto-roll and auto-leveling feature sometimes forces your ship to do some very strange and unwelcome maneuvering while attempting to complete tasks like strafing a star destroyer’s ion batteries. The game gives you the option to disable these features, but you really only end up becoming more disoriented if you do it that way, since the levels were designed with a auto-leveled horizontal-style map in mind.

Now on to the good things:

The graphics are extremely good and high-polygon. According to the unlockable documentary, they are truly pushing the limits of the Gamecube’s RAM capabilities to its limits with this game. In truth, they did a fine job of keeping the frame rate up during the entirety of the single-player game. The game doesn’t make much of a noticeable improvement on RSII’s polygon count, but then RSII looked extremely close to the real thing in terms of space ship from the beginning! In-game cutscenes, unfortunately, are less than great in they never show things like your character actually doing something like climbing into an AT-ST. You just kinda see him walk up to it and the next thing you know you are driving it, with no evidence at all that the guy wasn’t magically teleported to the top of this 20-foot tall contraption!

The music is good as well and has a nice John Williams-ish feel to it. Sound effects pretty good, although I swear the sound of a speeder-bike putting on the breaks sounds like someone gunning the engines! LOL Anyway, different guns have different sounds that fit their appearance which is good (red lasers go SQUAT and thin green ones go flit).

The gameplay is both good and bad, but I’ve already told you the bad so here’s the bright side:
Lots of different stuff to do! While its not a lot of fun to be walking around with that stupid camera angle, the ground-based vehicles are a welcome change from the previous games. Never before were you able to play a game where you can decimate an imperial attack force in a snow-speeder, then rescue survivors from the wreckage using an AT-ST, and then end the day with a cliff-jumping or tree-dodging (whichever mission you prefer) game of chicken on speeder bikes! There are even shortcuts on the Endor forest missions which you can take to reach your objective sooner or pick up a secret upgrade.

In closing, this game is really cool, but not without its share of bugs and glitches and bad camera angles. If you are a Star Wars fan who likes action games, it’s definitely a must-have. Even if you already own RSII, I highly recommend buying it if you can find a used copy. Otherwise, at least rent it because you’ll be missing out on some great stuff if you don’t.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/21/04