Title: Rouge Squadron II: Rouge Leader
Developer: Factor 5
Publisher: LucasArts
System: Nintendo Gamecube
Released: 11/18/01
Review Date: 2/24/02
Edited: 3/14/02

Review by: Transmetal

What movie has most influenced your life? Was it Scary Movie? Was it Not Another Teen Movie? Or maybe it was Dude, Where's My Car? It is seriously hoped that none of the above influenced your life in any way, shape, or form. There are obviously many answers to this question, but when asked, most people would probably say "Star Wars". This is no surprise, for a movie to come out in 1977 and continue to this very day to make a profit (through remakes, sequels, ect...) it has to be good. But there are good movies, and there are really good movies. The Star Wars movies tend to not fit into either of those catagories, no, for they are above and beyond what any other movie has ever achieved (although many would argue that Lord of the Rings, a recently released film, is a contender for this distinction). These films have created a fan base, large and vast beyond any resonable person's imagination. There is even a religion based on this movie! And what successful film has yet to not have various liscensed material based upon it? Star Wars is no different. At last count there was 30+ videogames based on the Star Wars universe, not including educational titles. (sigh) Thats quite a bit, and surprisingly, not all of them subcumb to the requisite "liscensing curse". A great deal of them are actually quite good! This is no small feat, as most gamers know.

Remember the classic PC game X-Wing? Back in the days of 2D graphics, this 3D dogfight simulater would eat up all your spare time by putting your sorry ass right into the cockpit of the mother of all star-fighters, the X-Wing. In this biatch of a space craft you blasted TIEs to scrap, saved wookies from slavery, made alliances with other governments, and took out that pesky Death Star with a single proton torpedo. This experience was further refined in the 1998 release of Rouge Squadron for the N64, which although not as nostalgic an experience (remember though, its a recent game in comparison to X-Wing), was certainly a refinement of the space dogfight experience. In it, you piloted multiple vehicles on a variety of missions. You saved Mos Eisley from Imperial bombardment. You blew up Imperial bases. You saved innocent planets. You. Kicked. Ass. But most importantly, it was fun!

Now, several years later (and one Star Wars movie later...) we have the sequel; Rouge Squadron II: Rouge Leader. Ever since its first appearence, it has been dubbed THE launch title to watch. For a game to only be a little more than a year and a half into development, and look this damn fine was amazing. The graphics were certainly up to par with the expectations of a "Next Generation" game. Its sound had the classic John Williams tunes. And it had the market advantage of being a "Star Wars Game". All the pieces were set into place. True to word, it released in November on the launch date of the Gamecube. With all eyes looking towards this to be the killer app for Gamecube, it certainly has much to live up to... Is it the killer app we were waiting for? Is it fun? Or is this the latest victim of the "liscensing curse"? Read on...

First Glance

Well... First impressions are pretty important... And for Rouge Leader, well, it was certainly interesting. Upon booting up the system and getting past the Gamecube logo, the player is greeted with... A well coordinated dance routine by a platoon of stormtroopers, backed by the funky Cantina music from the first Star Wars. Seriously, they started dancing, and... uuug... It could of been worse... Upon entering the menu, you notice a nice piece of eye candy. In the background of all the menus, a small clip from the first Star Wars trilogy will play. After going flipping through the menus, I am almost convinced they have compiled a good 3/4 of each of the movies in those clips. Nifty stuff.

Upon creating a save file name, you come to the level select. You get to chose between the training mission and the first level, which is (ironically) the battle over the first Death Star. The training mission is done quite well, it is fairly simple and will help you learn all of the controls and operations in a short period of time. There is no real requirments in this level, it is all purely optional. However, the experience will become invaluable during the time you play the game. Then there is this interesting feature in the level, that, when you play the level during different times of day the level will change accordingly. For example, if you play the game past, say 8pm, the level will look like it's night. After you finish the training level, the obvious next step is to play the Death Star level (An interesting place within the Star Wars universe to begin the game). It is fairly easy, blast the large towers with your laser. Proceed to irradicate the TIEs, then do the famous trench run and make that 1 in a million shot to destroy the moon-sized battle station. BOO - YEA! Welcome to Rouge Leader.

Graphics

During the pre-release hype, one widly publisized rumor was that Factor 5 had used the computer graphic models of the AT - ATs, X-Wing, etc.... from the Star Wars: Special Edition movies. Well, this is obviously not true. In movies, computer graphics use N.U.R.B.S. (Non - Uniform Rationale B-splines) which are clumps of polynomial equations. In videogames, 3D graphics are still rendered in polygons which are those closed geometric shapes you learned about in Geometry. Don't worry if that was confusing. In general, that simply means that Factor 5 did not, and could not use the models from the movies. But it can be easily seen how they were mistaken. These graphics are on par with what was seen in the movies. No joke. Combined with the use of similar camera angles from the movie, the only reason you can tell the difference between the game and the movie is the fact that the game runs at 60 fps where as movies run at around 24 fps. By this argument, the graphics in the game are superior to that of the movie. The graphics are simple beautiful, the amount of polygons, the detail put into the textures simply stagger the imagination. All of the nay-sayers who love to point out Gamecube's supposedly "weaker" graphics processor (I'm looking in the general direction of a certain site's web-master ;) will not have much of an argument to fall back on once they see this game. These graphics are fast, smooth, and have a talent at showing how satisfying it is to see a TIE fighter explode into shrapnel. However, there is one drawback to being a launch game. As nice as these graphics are, there is an occasional slowdown in certain situations. Such as when you are flying through a large explosion, or when there is a large number of independently moving objects right in your face. But these examples are few, and far between to the point where they are not a true annoyance. But to be sure, if given some extra time, these problems could have been elimanted. And remember, this is just a launch title, and considering it's rushed schedual, just imagine what future games will be able to do. This is only the begining.

Rating: 9/10
Sound

Was there any doubt? John Williams is the man. It's most likely he hadn't any idea as to how well known his work for Star Wars would become. It was just a single movie! Now, almost 30 years later those tunes are just as memorable today as they were then. They are so rich in their own greatness, that they have been used in games again and again... Factor 5 could have easily just popped in a pre-recorded copy of his music, and let it go at that. In fact, most people would have gone ahead and given it a good score. However, the music IS after all, 25+ years old. It's nice music, but it's quite irritating to see a company make no effort to create original material. Thankfully, that is not the case in this game. Although many of the tunes seem slightly familiar, they are for the most part original. AND up to par with some of John William's greatest. What's more? It was ALL recorded in that beefy 5.1 surround sound Doubly format. Then there are the sound effects. It's hard to grade these. These effects are certainly not original. They are the same laser thingies we heard from the 1977 original. BUT, they are all part of the Star Wars universe, which brings up the presentation to a level of perfection. Then the fact that it's mixed in a dynamic 5.1 surround sound presentation, well, it makes the game THAT much more enjoyable Speaking of accuracy to the movie, it's surprising to see that at least one of the original actors came back and did some voice-overs for his character. This character happens to be Wedge Antilles. As for the rest of the voice actors... For the most part they did a nice job. None of the voices are irritating in any way. But some of the side characters (ex. pilot of a rebel transport) can get on your nerves. In one situation, a pilot of an exploding ship lets out a very un-enthusiastic "uuug" noise as his ship is destroyed. On the other hand, the rebel X-Wing pilots let out a convincing scream when they dies... But anyway... Here is the real secret to Rouge Leader's sound. Its in freaking Doulby Surround! Yup, thats right! That's great news for those of us who have surround sound equipment! But, then the average user is still stuck with normal stereo sound... (sigh) So while the sound is not too original, it's still extremely pleasing to listen to, and is presented in a very innovative and refreshing manner (at least for those who have surround sound).

Rating: 9/10
Gameplay

Shooting games are a tricky thing. It is hard to create a balanced variety of gameplay in a genre which is all about harmfull objects traveling from point A to point B and creating either an explosion or some sort of damage. Games like Quake thrive from having the same simple concept, but in which you can employ mulititudes of stratagies, having time to explore, and experiencing a social atmosphere(as odd as it may sound). The key thing is that you have a reasonable amount of freedom. Within Rouge Leader you are severely restricted. One irritating example is the Hoth mission. In it, you must destroy these AT-STs and these AT-ATs but you can't destroy THOSE AT-ATs or AT-STs. You aren't even given a chance because of "time restraints". Even with some clever manuvering, destroying the frontal AT-ATs first so as to have more time, you are quickly switched over to another objective. Never giving you anything resembling free time to explore the area, look for those secret upgrades. In other words, the game forces you to follow a formula of sorts for each level. Go to point A then perform action B. There are some good precedents for this however. The classic game Robotron put restrictions on you, and then sent hundreds of robots after you... But you weren't forced to kill robots in a certain order. You could choose which robot you wanted to destroy. The classic X-Wing PC game did a good job by giving you a mission obective, and leaving you with that. You could do whatever the hell you wanted after that. You could ignore the whole damn mission and stage a suicide assault on that Star Destroyer if you wanted. You would fail the mission of course, but you still had a certain satisfaction at flexing you freedom. Even the original Rouge Squadron gave the player more freedom. Within the confines of the gameplay however, it is still fun. There is a certain feeling of satisfaction at watching a TIE spin out of control after you shoot it with your lasers, or watching a Star Destroyer crash into a planet as a result of a rebel counter attack. And then there is a fairly good variety of structured missions in the game. Sometimes all you need to do is blast TIEs, other times you need to bomb targets. Then sometimes you need to protect ships, or sometimes even destroy a rather large target or two (hmmmm... I wonder what those could be? ;). And then of course there is the medals. The better your shot accuracy, completion time, and general efficiancy in the mission is, the better the award you recieve. Then these medals are translated into points, which you can use to unlock other missions. One example is a bonus mission in which you fly as Darth Vader over the first Death Star, taking out X-Wings and defending the Empire. As if that weren't enough, there are upgrades hidden in each of the levels. Then there are passwords you can enter in the option menu to unlock things like a "Making of..." movie. These add a huge amount of replay value to the game, which almost justifies the repetitiveness of shooting from a spacecraft in a restricted enviorment. Almost, but not quite. There are some other interesting facets to the gameplay, like the AI of both the wingmen and the TIEs. The TIEs have this great AI which allows them to dodge your fire. But they consitantly seem to run into head on collisions with me. You would figure that AI which allowed a TIE to dodge speed-of-light-lasers would have allowed it to dodge a fairly bulky X-Wing. Or maybe they just specialize in Kamikaze attacks. Who knows? Then the Wingmen... They actually have fairly nice AI. Whenever the player starts to "suck", the wingmen help pick up the slack by taking out a TIE or two. This creates a nice challenge for those who are talented in such games, as the wingmen will stand back while the TIEs will be as crafty as ever. In the end, the gameplay certainly qualifies as fun, but not as deep as some would have hoped.

Rating: 7/10
Controls

In particular, control was another thing that needed to be mentioned. For the most part, its great, helped in part by the greatness that is the Gamecube controller. The controller itself is perfect, it just is, there is no other way to explain it. Within the game itself, it is used quite well. The control setup is quite intuitive, and after a half hour or so in the training mission it will become second nature. However, there is one chink in the armor. The control of the craft is oriented according to gravity. That means that whenever you twist upside down or something, it will automatically right you. Even if you turn this option off, you feel as if the game is forcing you to do it manually. This becomes kind of irritating in space, as there should not be any gravity to orient against. It may help newcomers, but it feels kind of strange.

Rating: 8/10
Overview/Recap

Being Gamecube’s title game, it had a lot to live up to. For the most part, it meets these expectations. The graphics are spectacular, certainly above par. They are smooth and, just, wow. Very well done. The sound is fairly nice too, the Doulby 5.1 channel surround mix brings them about in a realistic presentation. But, then again, the music is the same music we have been hearing since the original starwars release. The gameplay is fun. Destroying TIEs and watching them disintegrate into oblivion is an enjoyable experience. The variety in missions liven things up, and the different abilities of the crafts further diversify the gameplay. Then, there is an amazing amount of replay value in collecting the medals and unlocking extra missions (An opportunity to destroy Rebel fighters as Darth Vader in his TIE?! Yes, please!). However, it suffers from being a shooter game. The fact that consistently firing damaging projectile from point A to point B and thus damage/destroy object creates a somewhat repetitious facet to the gameplay. Overall, this is a great game. Playing this game feels like being in the movies itself. For any StarWars fanatic, this is a must buy. But for everyone else, is it the killer app Nintendo fans have waited for? Not exactly, there are enough problems with the game to degrade the experience, but only somewhat. Its certainly worth the purchase, and easily one of the top 5 games for the Gamecube.

Points of Interest/Point and Laugh
  • + Shooting TIEs is fun shit!
  • + Armies upon armies of trained military pilots can be taken out by a squadron of less than 10 rebel fighters who have next to no flight experience
  • - Apparently, gravity affects you in space the same way it does on earth
  • ? Banthas and Stormtroopes, both organic animals, explode into shrapnel when disintigrated by lasers. Huh?
  • ? When attempting to trip AT-ATs, the rope falls and then the AT-AT trips afterwards
  • + The rebellion against the X Box... I mean... The Empire lives on!
  • Let Me Repeat that One More Time

    Graphics: 9/10
    Beautifully detailed, ect...

    Sound: 9/10
    Beautiful presentation, John William re-mixes abound

    Gameplay: 7/10
    Fun, but slightly repititous

    Control: 8/10
    Intuitive, but why does gravity affect me in space?

    Overall (not an average): 8/10
    Must buy for any Star Wars fans out there. It's a great game, just not perfect