Still quite incredible to look at even 19 years later. One of the graphical showcases of the GameCube as a launch title. Production values just off the charts. Great music, sound design, and voice actors, not that those things are hard to reproduce from the movie side of things. But they put in the work to get all that stuff and those actors, and it's all employed well here.

The gameplay is great. The controls are good and the game is deeper than I realized. In first person view, you can look around the cockpit. Your fighter crosshairs help you lead targets. Your lasers are stronger when that goofy bar is charged (never knew what that thing represented when I was a kid). I was also happy when I realized you can slowly turn if you hold both shoulder buttons. Oops! Didn't know that.

Overall, the combat looks and feels and sounds great. It's the game design and level design that bog this one down.

Missions are short--some may run you only 5 minutes. But there is no way to recover health during a mission, and some of the playable fighters take such limited damage before being destroyed that they're essentially worthless in my opinion. Even the ones with a little more defense go down somewhat easily, and if you lose 3 lives, you get sent back to the main menu.

When I think of frustrating game design, this is part of it. You lost all your lives, okay fine. If you fail a mission by not meeting a required objective, the game at least offers you a chance to restart the mission from the beginning. But if you lose all your lives, which happens a lot, you have to go back to the main menu, load your profile, select your mission, load the hangar, select an aircraft, and load the mission. I know this game came out in 2001, but this is unforgivable. For crying out loud, why don't they let you restart a mission when you run out of lives if they'll let you restart if you fail an objective?

To compound this problem, the game is fiendishly difficult. I browsed some of the reviews here before writing mine, and I'm glad I'm not alone. I stopped counting, for example, how many attempts I needed to beat the final Death Star mission, but it was upwards of 75 attempts and multiple days. It's frankly a little surprising how hard it was to beat some of these missions. I will say that I dabbled in a few walkthroughs just for some general hints or strategies to beat some missions that had me seriously stumped, and some of them were "D'oh, my fault. That makes sense." But some of them are just seriously challenging.

One gimmick of the game is there in the title: Rogue Leader. In this game, you get to give orders to your wingmen. I never noticed very much difference in what I told them to do. What this game needs is the Ace Combat 6 option where you can order them to shoot at the people shooting at you.

Ultimately, Rogue Leader is an absolute joy to play and look at even now. It's just extremely hard.

La secuela de uno de los mejores juegos del Nintendo 64 hace honor a sus orígenes y supera a su predecesor, ofreciendo acción, dificultad y una experiencia sobrecogedora en todos los aspectos de su apartado jugable. Rogue Leader aparte de contar con unas gráficas impresionantes y una banda sonora envidiable, también logra simular de la manera más real posible el control de todas las naves espaciales que tendremos bajo nuestro control (con un control de Game Cube, lo cual es excelente) y que forman parte del gran universo Star Wars. Es una compra obligada para todo seguidor de la saga, para todo aquel que haya disfrutado de la primera parte, y para todo aquel que guste de un buen simulador de combate aéreo. Factor 5 sigue demostrando que es muy bueno en lo que hace, con la compañía de Lucas Arts.

This is a stunning launch title that still holds up visually. I was surprised and a little disappointed revisiting this overall, however. The game looks stunning but actually playing it is frustrating more than anything else. The controls are very squirrely, and the ships themselves feel more like floating cameras than vehicles. The real killer though is the mission design, which outside of a handful of classics everyone remembers (the trench run and the first Battle of Endor level) ranges from forgettable to outright malevolent.

Prisoners of the Maw asks you to ignore everything exciting happening to do drivebys in the Y-wing. The Battle of Hoth really wants to show off its Snowspeeder cable tech, and makes you reenact tripping the AT-ATs a mind-numbing amount of times. There's an Ace Combat-esque canyon stealth run to hijack a shuttle that feels like the beginning of a wild escape mission that never builds to an exciting twist. And then there's Strike at the Core, which clearly wants to feel like a sadomasochistic gauntlet for players to overcome with all the skills they've learned, but it's so full of seemingly random lasers and enemy behavior it feels more like a miracle than a challenge to finish.

I have fond memories of playing this thing over and over, but revisiting it without that launch title sheen reveals a lot of flawed design. I hate to do the direct comparison thing, but Ace Combat 04 came out at nearly the same time and is easily the better arcade flight game. This is still absolutely worth playing just to experience the attention to detail and enthusiasm for the source material, though!

One of my first Star Wars games and one of personal all-time favorites. God, this game is such a marvel, and despite being a launch title for the GameCube it looks absolutely stunning to this very day, to the point that even modern PC's can't emulate this game properly. That being said, God do I wish this got a rerelease so bad, or at least an HD collection of all 3 Rogue Squadron games to be put on modern platforms. I'd love nothing more, to be honest. But until then, this game will always hold a fond spot in my heart.

A game I've had since the day it was released, but I'd never beaten, until today. I was listening to a podcast covering Star Wars games and it mentioned the Rogue Squadron series. I thought I'd stick the first game on and have a crack at that. A good excuse to stick the N64 on. I had a good time. After a few levels, I thought I'd stick the GameCube on and give Rogue Leader a go.

This is the first time since the mid 00's that I'd played the game on a CRT with a scart, and it was like the bit where Milhouse enters his name into Bonestorm. It blew my socks off all over again. This is one great looking game.

The opening Death Star level has to be up there with one of the greatest opening levels in any game I've ever played. It looks great, it sounds great and it's as close as you're getting to experiencing the thrill of the iconic finale in the film. We'll, unless you're one of those fancy folk with their vr helmets.

Unfortunately, it's not all as thrilling from there. There's a range of levels that contain some great dog fighting and set pieces, but there are also Y-wing levels.

Hoth is there, we've also got the battle of Endor and the bullshit last level of the Death Star II. A lot of the time I was playing, I was having a great time. Blowing up ties, walkers and various other imperial ass holes, but some of the levels really take the wind out of your sails, and are very difficult. I don't expect to finish a level perfectly on my first go, I don't want to be trying 20 times just to beat the level, let alone meet the criteria for gold. But I guess that's where the replay value comes in.

Repetition means familiarity, and improvement etc. Then bonus levels. A few of them I really don't have any desire to revisit, but those replicating the set pieces from the films are special. Even the last level that took many, many attempts. Once I'd finally beaten it, I was already looking at how I could improve on it. However, it's the first time I'd beaten the game since it came out, so I'm not gonna get cocky.

It can't be overstated how great this game looks and how fun it is to play. It's just let down by a few shite levels and a really steep difficulty curve. It's good to finally tick this one off.