Number 44: Star Wars Rouge Squadron 2: Rouge Leader, Lucasarts 2001
Intro:
No introductory cinematic? Boo! Straight to an ugly menu screen with clips from the Starwars films playing in the background. The first missions starts out with the Star Wars scrolling story, but after a direct rip out of the Special Edition films it gets right into the game.
Getting Going:
The game offers a frustrating and exhaustive tutorial course, full of floating icons that each start a training mission. There are just too many mini-missions: this stage can take forever to really complete, and isn't even required. The first real level is easy enough, and can be a lot of fun for fans who can't get enough out of that Death Star attack scene, which has seen game after game since the Atari vector game and changes little.
Fun:
The first couple levels, pulled right from the films, are fun and relatively easy to complete. Suddenly, however, the player is thrust into space fights which are desperatly disorienting due to the lack of a horizon or any indication of which way "up" is. The surroundings quickly become very typical space fare, and the gameplay demands more and more out of the player without giving much back.
Visuals:
The graphics are great for a first generation Gamecube title. Textures are well detailed, the lighting is convincing, and the shaders make sense. The tow cables in the Hoth battle are shameful, however, and while the graphics look nice at first, there are no new tricks after the first couple of levels to make it worthy of special praise.
Intelligence:
Enemies have a couple evasive behaviors, but ultimately they all behave the same way: poorly. The wingmen don't seem to be terribly constructive teammates, and enemy squadrons keep tight formation even when they're getting torn apart. The Deathstar fight demands the player only brake and drop behind the TIE fighters to shoot them out, where as I would expect them to also slow down and try to keep behind me.
Immersion:
The music and action are pretty effective on levels with some sort of frame of reference, but space levels get really frustrating without a sense of up and down. There is little to really hold a player unless they are Star Wars fans or undstand the HUD enough to keep their bearings.
Cameras:
Little to complain about for the typical 3rd person camera: being out in space, few things get in the way. During the Hoth fight, when the tow cable was deployed, the camera took a different perspective which made the controls feel very seperated, and this was highly irritating and distracting.
Controls:
For the most part, the controls are functionally great. Some help with the variation between the different ships would have been greatly appreciated. The real issue is with the HUD robbing the player of any kind of artificial horizon to keep track of, which makes tight dogfights needlessly frustrating.
Ideas:
This game is just a continuation of the fleshed out Hoth battle from Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire for the Nintendo 64. The small, contained fights with a horizon are a lot of fun, but the experience translates very poorly in space.
Memory:
The levels with some frame of reference are pretty fun, but the rest is very frustrating. A moderately polished package for Star Wars fans and fans of the series showing off the graphical possiblities the first generation of Gamecube games represented.
No introductory cinematic? Boo! Straight to an ugly menu screen with clips from the Starwars films playing in the background. The first missions starts out with the Star Wars scrolling story, but after a direct rip out of the Special Edition films it gets right into the game.
Getting Going:
The game offers a frustrating and exhaustive tutorial course, full of floating icons that each start a training mission. There are just too many mini-missions: this stage can take forever to really complete, and isn't even required. The first real level is easy enough, and can be a lot of fun for fans who can't get enough out of that Death Star attack scene, which has seen game after game since the Atari vector game and changes little.
Fun:
The first couple levels, pulled right from the films, are fun and relatively easy to complete. Suddenly, however, the player is thrust into space fights which are desperatly disorienting due to the lack of a horizon or any indication of which way "up" is. The surroundings quickly become very typical space fare, and the gameplay demands more and more out of the player without giving much back.
Visuals:
The graphics are great for a first generation Gamecube title. Textures are well detailed, the lighting is convincing, and the shaders make sense. The tow cables in the Hoth battle are shameful, however, and while the graphics look nice at first, there are no new tricks after the first couple of levels to make it worthy of special praise.
Intelligence:
Enemies have a couple evasive behaviors, but ultimately they all behave the same way: poorly. The wingmen don't seem to be terribly constructive teammates, and enemy squadrons keep tight formation even when they're getting torn apart. The Deathstar fight demands the player only brake and drop behind the TIE fighters to shoot them out, where as I would expect them to also slow down and try to keep behind me.
Immersion:
The music and action are pretty effective on levels with some sort of frame of reference, but space levels get really frustrating without a sense of up and down. There is little to really hold a player unless they are Star Wars fans or undstand the HUD enough to keep their bearings.
Cameras:
Little to complain about for the typical 3rd person camera: being out in space, few things get in the way. During the Hoth fight, when the tow cable was deployed, the camera took a different perspective which made the controls feel very seperated, and this was highly irritating and distracting.
Controls:
For the most part, the controls are functionally great. Some help with the variation between the different ships would have been greatly appreciated. The real issue is with the HUD robbing the player of any kind of artificial horizon to keep track of, which makes tight dogfights needlessly frustrating.
Ideas:
This game is just a continuation of the fleshed out Hoth battle from Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire for the Nintendo 64. The small, contained fights with a horizon are a lot of fun, but the experience translates very poorly in space.
Memory:
The levels with some frame of reference are pretty fun, but the rest is very frustrating. A moderately polished package for Star Wars fans and fans of the series showing off the graphical possiblities the first generation of Gamecube games represented.