Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II - Rogue Leader is a blast from the past that still delivers exhilarating thrills. As a member of Rogue Squadron, you'll dogfight TIE fighters, recreate the Death Star trench run, and battle AT-ATs on Hoth. The graphics, while dated by today's standards, were groundbreaking for the GameCube and still hold a nostalgic charm. Intense missions, smooth controls, and unlockable bonuses will keep Star Wars fans engaged and excited. This slice of Star Wars space combat is pure joy in a digital package.

When discussing gaming difficulty, Dark Souls often comes to mind for many. While Dark Souls certainly offers a challenge, the enjoyment lies in overcoming it and learning from mistakes to make previously tough enemies more manageable. Rogue Squadron II, however, presents a different kind of difficulty. Designed as an arcade experience, its primary goal was to consume your coins, urging players to spend countless hours mastering even a brief five-minute level. While it's technically impressive, it was not made for the arcades, but for a home console, so its relentless difficulty is very daunting. While Rogue Squadron II is undeniably a gaming masterpiece, it's one I'd rather admire from my shelf than struggle to conquer.

Review in progress:
Very impressive graphics for the time. There's a good amount of variety in the mission design. As far as arcade flight games go, this is fairly well done. Captures the Star Wars atmosphere well.

Unfortunately, Rogue Squadron II is incredibly difficult, and not always in a hard-but-fair way. Mission objectives are often unclear. The tutorial mission does a poor job of preparing you for the rest of the game and only goes over the basic mechanics. You'll frequently be killed in 1-2 seconds by enemies off-screen with almost no time to react (especially in the squishy A-wing). There's a ton of trial and error involved, and victories often feel unsatisfying as a result.

The difficulty is wildly inconsistent between missions, which is poor design. Instead of a gradually increasing difficulty curve, there are often very hard missions followed by laughably easy ones. The AI partners are completely useless. I never felt like they were helping me out and giving them different commands never made a tangible impact on the mission's success. The lack of a health meter on structures you're trying to defend is very frustrating and leads to many unexpected mission failures. If having a visual indicator for damage is too "gamey", then they could've at least had more frequent radio chatter indicating that something is going to be destroyed soon. That only happens for some of the targets.

I can't help but wonder if the brutal difficulty was a way of artificially padding out the short completion length. Rogue Squadron II feels like an NES game in that respect. It would've been nice to have a "normal" difficulty option. The difficulty doesn't feel integral to the game design in the same way as something like Dark Souls. At the very least, they could've done a much better job of communicating with the player. I shouldn't need to consult a guide to figure out what I'm even doing wrong. How was I supposed to know that the B-Wing needed to be closed in order to avoid taking insane amounts of damage or that the air balloons could be taken out by aiming at the top part? The targeting computer doesn't even highlight it!