"Even with the sweet taste of victory fresh in their mouths, the Alliance must go on fighting, and hold in balance their tragic lives of despair"

OPENING STATEMENT
Excuse me. I must disengage my Proton Torpedoes. Well, it is time to hear from Matt91486 regarding the Game Cube launch once more, this time reporting live from space. OK, I am actually reporting about a month after launch, on a month old game. So sue me. Anyway, I have just witnessed the destruction of the super-powerful Death Star. I have just witnessed my game freezing on the Battle of Hoth mission when I was just about to complete it, and I was forced to do it again. (Hoth is cold, but it should not be cold enough to cause the game to freeze.) With scenes straight out of the movie, Star Wars: Rogue Leader has enlightened my minuscule Star Wars knowledge than any game since Force Commander.

GAMEPLAY--7
This is the same space-shooting gameplay that has been recycled for many years now, and the series is in need of an overhaul. I am tired of piloting an X-Wing in circles firing things at various TIE Fighters. I need more. If you are new to the Star Wars space-shooting games, then you will probably not have any problems with the old gameplay, because it will be new to you. (Ugh. That sounds like an NBC slogan for summer reruns.) What I am trying to tell you here is that classic gameplay is not always a good thing, when classic is meant in the sense of old.

Then why did Star Wars: Rogue Leader still garner a respectable score in this category, you ask? Because there was one major addition that gives it some ounce of respectability. Instead of your squadron-mates simply flying in circles drawing away fire from you, you can now give them orders. And if you liked them flying in circles drawing fire away from you, simply give them orders to do that. Luckily you can also order them to protect you, attack various targets, defend the area, flee the battle, and various other things. This adds an element of strategy to an otherwise (mostly) mindless shooter. More than one element would have sure been nice, however.

GRAPHICS--10
Wow. Star Wars: Rogue Leader is easily the best looking Game Cube game, if not the best looking video game, on the face of the earth. I will start out small in my descriptions, with the menus. Even the text on the screen looks clearer than it did in Star Wars: Rogue Squadron. More impressive is the fact that all of the menus are overlaid on video clips straight from the movie series. That is correct, while you are deciding which code to enter, you can be watching a squadron of Stormtroopers stream down a corridor. Many other aspects of the game are overlaid upon clips from the movie. For example, in the Death Star Run mission, one of the most documented clips is featured, with ships (done in real-time) hurtling away from the exploding Death Star (taken from the enhanced Star Wars: A New Hope movie). While you have probably already heard about that example of overlaying, there are many more featured throughout Star Wars: Rogue Leader.

Perhaps more impressive is how minute the difference between the explosions generated in real-time, and those pilfered from the movies. Unless you look very carefully at comparisons of the two images, you will have a great deal of trouble noticing that the movie versions look slightly cleaner. On the plus side, the real-time explosions look better than the explosions from the original movie versions. (Star Wars: Rogue Squadron only uses video clips from the enhanced versions.)

And then we have the grandaddy of them all; The beautiful textures. I mean, you cannot even tell that these ships are made of polygons they are so smooth. Polygon tearing was one of the biggest graphical problems with Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, and the developers at Lucas Arts have gotten it all fixed up for this second go-round, and the textures benefit from it as well. I am telling you, George Lucas would be quite proud of these developers’ abilities to recreate so flawlessly these ships on such a small little console.

Even though the graphics are some of the best ever seen, and Star Wars: Rogue Leader has garnered a perfect ten in this category, that is not to say that some more work could have been done on these graphics. (Keep in mind that I would much rather have them working on the gameplay or the control for a sequel rather than the graphics.) Sometimes the game does not register the various textures and they, well, go through each other. For example, one of the occasionally the game will show you that your ship went straight through a rocky outcropping rather than right over it. Thankfully this problem occurs very rarely, and it does not affect gameplay in the least. And this is really nitpicking, but in the instruction manual an image of an A-Wing is showed next to the description of a Snowspeeder. (The A-Wing is also correctly shown next to its own information as well. You just get to see it twice in a row.) Now if Lucas Arts would only fire their bug testers and get some that have a clue what they are doing for the next go round.

MUSIC--9
SOUND--9
If you are blind, you could still enjoy being in the same room as Star Wars: Rogue Leader. (Of course, if you were blind you could not be reading this review so I really have no idea why I started off with that sentence. Oh well.) Music from all walks of the Star Wars life is present and accounted for, and the orchestral masterpieces from the movies fit unbelievably well with a fast-paced space-shooting game. The opening theme, with one of the few upbeat songs from the Star Wars universe even features a mini-music video, with Stormtroopers dancing, and then holding up signs to form the logo of Lucas Arts. Since they did not have to spend any time actually composing the music, Lucas Arts was able to devote much more time to arranging the music in fitting locations and situations, and that extra time made Star Wars: Rogue Leader flow very well.

The sound effects are quite good as well. Lucas Arts obviously listened to my review of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron and did a much better job varying the sound effects between the different weaponry. (Yes, I do realize that it is highly unlikely that they actually read my review, but let my fragile ego think that.) On top of all of that, the more superfluous sound effects have been beefed up quite a bit as well. Now you can hear the odd noise that the TIE Fighters make as they whiz past you, made famous by the dogfight scenes from all of the movies. I still have absolutely no idea how they came up with that sound effect, let alone how they actually make it, but it sure makes Star Wars: Rogue Leader a great deal more atmospheric. The last thing that I will mention in this audio category is the voice acting. If the voice actors for the various characters are not the same ones that played the characters in the movies, then Lucas Arts found some very, very good mimics. (In other words, they either dug up Mark Hamill from the acting graveyard to lend his voices to the game, or they said “Let him lie there with Carrie Fisher,” and found someone who came very, very close. That goes for all of the characters as well, except for with their respective actors.) And while I think some of the actors have very limited talent in real life (*cough*Mark Hamill*cough*), these characters sound quite a bit better.

CONTROL--7
The Game Cube controller works better with Star Wars: Rogue Leader than any of the other launch titles that I have played. There are just enough buttons to carry out all of the features that Lucas Arts needed to include in all of the ships cockpits for everything to remain functional. More impressive is the fact that when cramming all of these features into this Game Cube controlled, they ended up with a configuration that is tolerable at all, let alone fairly good. Sure it has it’s issues, such as the small size and miniscule distance between the ‘Y’ and ‘X’ buttons causing me numerous flubs, especially with ships with S-Foils. Scenes often were carried out like this. I would ask my friend if he thought I should whip out the targeting computer (with ‘Y’) to better defend myself from the onslaught of TIE Fighters heading this way. While I was asking the question, I had already pressed down the ‘Y’ button while glancing towards him, so it ended up being a rhetorical question, a moot point. Then he yelled something to the effect of “Why in the hell did you close the wings! Now you cannot fire!” By the time I processed exactly what he was saying, and looked back at the screen, my poor little B-Wing was shot to pieces by a fleet of TIE Fighters. You could almost see the corners of the mouths on those odd little masks that the pilots wear turn up in a sort of snide smile.

Anyway, other than the few button location issues, Star Wars: Rogue Leader controls quite well. Lag between your ship and your controller is absolutely nonexistent, which is an absolute necessity in such a game as this, a game that has your trigger figure always pressing down. The configuration creates enough problems without having the game refuse to listen to you.

FUN--5
Star Wars: Rouge Leader is a game that does everything right. And yet, it is not fun in the least. Whenever I am playing this game I constantly have that feeling that I have done the exact same thing before. Now, I am all for classic compilations of old games, so this is not even usually a bad thing in my department. The theme of Rogue Squadron has not aged well, however, and that is quite possibly the biggest detriment to the fun that Star Wars: Rogue Leader has to offer. Of course, it never helps a a game when it freezes on me in the last part of the Hoth mission three or four times in a row. That is an excellent way to suck the fun out of anything.

An easy way to remedy this would be the inclusion of a kick-ass multiplayer mode. I mean, it is a shooting game after all, who on earth would not include a multiplayer mode. Well, the boys at Lucas Arts, that’s who. I could forgive this oversight in Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, because it was their first game using that engine and all, but it still annoyed me that one was not featured in a prime role, let alone available at all. However, that same oversight is unforgivable in Rogue Leader.

CHALLENGE--MEDIUM TO HIGH
Well, one good thing about Star Wars: Rogue Leader is that it will never get too easy. The first three or four missions can be passed easy enough, but when you have to take on the Star Destroyer, the heat instantly comes on, and it is a bit too warm for comfort. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron could be beaten quite easily, and Lucas Arts knew this. So, they beefed up the artificial intelligence of the Empire’s elite squadron of ships. The TIE Fighters now swarm, and they actually seem like people are actually piloting them. If you shoot down their buddies, the TIEs will go into a defensive mode, and concentrate more on saving themselves than attacking you. One way of combating this newfound difficulty is the fact that you can give your squadron-mates orders, to help you better carry out your missions. And, boy, that certainly helps a lot, so always be sure to keep them doing exactly what you want.

REPLAY VALUE--LOW TO MEDIUM
In the review of Star Wars: Rogue Leader by Electronic Gaming Monthly, they claimed that this title is a game that ‘keeps on giving’ after you have beaten it. Well, sadly, that is one of the most fatuous statements put into print in quite a long time. Once you beat Star Wars: Rogue Leader there is really no reason to keep playing it. Sure, the bonus missions and ships are nice, but they are really not worth the purchase. Besides, if you are any good at the game you will be getting medals the first time around anyway, so you would not actually have to replay anything. The bonus levels would just be played like any other level, and would not seem very ‘bonus’ in the least.

PROS
*One of the most graphically impressive games ever.
*Beefed up artificial intelligence from its predecessor.
*Music straight from the various Star Wars movies.

CONS
*Very little replay value at all.
*The controller configuration is a bit wacky.
*The game freezes! How horrible is that!

CLOSING STATEMENT
Star Wars: Rogue Leader is not a game that should be purchased. Sure, it works out fine as a rental, but there are just not enough hours of gameplay to make Star Wars: Rogue Leader sense as a purchase, unless you have lots of money to burn. Most gamers should be able to blow through Rogue Leader in a rental anyway. Besides, the game freezes on you! More than once!

OVERALL--6

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/15/01, Updated 12/15/01