Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

"Rogue Squadron does a great job living up to the great Starwars name"

I have loved Starwars from a very young age.
Watching, and loving my first Starwars Movie when I was about 6 years old. I’ve seen all of the Starwars movies to date, and own A New Hope, Return of the Jedi, and The Empire Strikes Back on Lazerdisc. I have a great love for Starwars…….*takes a sip from his starwars coffee mug*

The starwars games have been a hit and miss affair, with some of them totally sucking, others being average, some pretty good and some being totally awesome.
Rogue Squadron, for the Nintendo 64 is a very good game, and it would want to be, carrying the weight of the great Starwars movies on it’s shoulders is no easy task. Not many games could live up to such a name. Rogue Squadron, however certainly does, thanks to Factor 5, Lucasarts and Nintendo.



Gameplay
Rogue Squadron does very well for itself in the gameplay department. There is a good variety of missions for you to complete. With a Bronze, Silver and Gold medal to be earned in each. You can fly a variety of Starwars ships, including the X-wing, Y-wing,(plus many more) and with cheats the Naboo Starfighter, Tie Fighter and more cheat craft too.
In fact, a fairly kewel part of Rogue Squadron is the use of cheats, such as one that allows you to play in a secret level as an AT-ST, and another that lets you listen to all of the great orchestral scores found in the game from a menu. But back to Gameplay, to aquire a Bronze medal in a level is quite simple, once you know what you are doing. Getting a Silver will take a few more tries. Getting a Gold medal can take a LOT of practice, some levels are easier than others though.
The fields that you need to do well in are: Completion Time, Enemies Destroyed, Accuracy, Friendly Saves and Bonuses collected. As logic would denote, the accuracy required for a bronze medal would be considerably lower than that for the gold, and the enemies destroyed required for a silver, is more than is required fro the bronze etc etc. Overall the game is a joy to play, and you will be after those last few gold medals for a good few months.
8/10

Graphics
Rogue Squadron has very pretty graphics, detailed craft, and decent landscapes, and pretty good framerates(95% of the time at least). The only niggle I have in the graphics department with Rogue Squadron is the fog/fade in. In some levels it can get a tiny bit distracting seeing the landscape infront of you magically appear through a band of bland colour. Though, if it was pushed back, even a small amount the framerate would have taken a HUGE hit, so it’s understandable. But apart from that, the game is pretty too look at. It makes use of the Nintendo 64 “expansion pak” for slightly improved graphics (you can change from Hi-res to Standard-res in the options menu), but certainly doesn’t use the expansion pak to it’s fullest potential, but this was the case with all of the games that were designed and published soon after the Expansion pak was first released (another example is Turok 2:Seeds of Evil).
8/10

Sound
Dun…..Dun…..Dun……..dun……dun-dun……dun………dun-dun………(imperial march :P)
I cannot stress enough how much I love the sound effects, but more importantly the music in Starwars: Rogue Squadron. All my favourite tunes from the Starwars movies are in here plus loads of original music, some of the classics include; “imperial march”, the classic starwars theme, the “Luke Skywalker” theme (you know, the happy hero-y one?) plus there are heaps more.
The sound is of great quality. There are nice voiced mission briefings, and cut scenes. The ships screeching past and lazerfire all sound excellent as well.
The great use, of GREAT sound adds tremendously to the atmosphere of Rogue Squadron.
10/10

Multiplayer
Unfortunately Rogue Squadron has no multiplayer mode :( I would have loved to play through the missions with a friend helping me out. It would probably have caused the fog to be drawn in even closer, and caused a noticeable drop in framerate too though, not to mention have taken a lot of valuable development time and resources. But the game still stands strong without the multiplayer.
N/A

Replayability
I still play through Rogue Squadron every once in a while. I’m not exactly addicted to it, as once a mission is completed (gold medal) there is nothing more to do really. I mainly play over it when I am craving some starwars action.
7/10

Pros
*Great use of the Starwars licence
*Good graphics
*Excellent music
*Great sound effects
*Fun to play
*Good Variety of missions
*Will keep you playing for months
*Good difficulty level

Cons
*Annoying Fog/Fade-in
*No Multiplayer

Buy/rent
Buy. Starwars: Rogue Squadron is an excellent game, it’s very fun to play, and will keep you going and trying to earn all of those gold medals for months to come.

Overall
Starwars: Rogue Squadron is a great game. It’s got a true Starwars feel, it’s fun to play, has great atmosphere (helped greatly by the awesome music).
I spent months getting gold medals on all of the levels, and still come back to play it on every once in a while.

Now I have Starwars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron 2 for the GameCube to look forward to, which might I add is looking totally fan ****ing tastic :P

So, I’d say that anyone who is a Starwars Fan MUST own this game. And if you aren’t interested in Starwars one bit, this is still a game worth considering very carefully. A great game, truly deserving of a 9.


Overall 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/03/01, Updated 06/03/01