Game: Star Wars Rebel Strike: Rogue Squadron III
Console: GameCube
Developer: Factor 5
Publisher: LucasArts
Rating: T for Teen
TORONTO (djc) — This series always tests how good a game magazine’s editorial staff is. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen the game listed as “Rouge Squadron” in supposedly professional magazines, as though it were developed by Revlon or something.
But I digress.
For Rebel Strike: Rogue Squadron III, it’s the usual setup — a series of missions set across the original Star Wars trilogy in which you fly a variety of craft — X-Wings, B-Wings, the Millennium Falcon, even a Jedi Starfighter in a nod to the new trilogy. Blast away AT-STs on the ground, TIE Fighters in the air, and so on. The series harkens back all the way to Shadows of the Empire on Nintendo 64, where the very first level had us shooting up AT-STs in a Snow Speeder. For gamers, it’s been love ever since.
There is something new this time. Like Star Wars: The Clone Wars, there are on-foot missions, where you run around shooting Storm Troopers and hunting for objectives. To be honest, they really should have stuck with air missions. The ground mission camera views are lousy, the movement is choppy and it brings the pacing of the game to halt. It just doesn’t deliver the thrills of a 1st person or 3rd person shooter, so they should have left that to Jedi Outcast.
However, the air missions are pretty sweet, and that’s what it’s all about. They’re big and beautiful. They’re huge spaces packed with so many ships that, if you close your eyes and fire in a random direction, you’re still likely to hit something. The usual mission mainstays are here, including Hoth. You’ll also see Endor, Dagobah, and Yavin 4. It’s quite the tour of the Star Wars galaxy.
The game does however suffer from a slight lack of polish. The tutorial mode, for example, seems all over the place and doesn’t do a good job of pulling the player into the game. It just sort of drops these markers all over and you run into them, occasionally randomly, and then tells you what to do. In-game cutscenes have really bad edits, where you can see a black screen before it cuts to another shot. And those many ships on screen do sometimes exact their toll in the form of slowdown.
While the main game could have used a little more refining, the disk comes packed with extras that easily push this game into thumbs up territory. In fact, the extras alone are reason enough to pick up the game. They have packed Rogue Leader — the first LucasArts GameCube game — on to the disk as part of a multiplayer co-op mode. Yeah, the entire Rogue Leader. The catch is that it can only be played in multiplayer, not single, mode. But it doesn’t end there. Classic old titles have been hidden in the game, including Star Wars, The Empire Strike Back, and Return of the Jedi. It’s quite a thrill to play that old coin-op Star Wars game again if you’re an old-schooler like me. It plays a little too fast on the GameCube, but it’s great to see an old friend again.
I’m a little disappointed at the unrefined parts of the game — it’s very unlike LucasArts. But thankfully, the bonus stuff picks up for the slack. And ok, it’s impossible to dislike a game that has a bit where the Star Wars gang disco dances under a mirror ball that looks like the Death Star.
No, I didn’t make that last bit up.
