man...
I wanted to like this game a lot, due to both me being a reasonable enough fan of arcade dogfighting games as well as how much I admire factor 5s insane technical prowess, but shit man the balance is too off for me to really say I enjoyed myself here.
It really didn't feel like the vehicles were designed around the levels or vice versa, as each of the five main vehicles felt like they were more designed for air-to-ground combat rather than air-to-air, with maybe the exception of the V-wing? Each vehicles primary method of attack is the laser blaster cannon doohickeys, and the laser beams they shoot are slow and only shoot straight, and every vehicle except the speeder has an extremely limited supply of either static rockets or bombs as a secondary weapon. As someone used to games like Ace Combat, I was yearning for some homing missiles to actually pressure airborne enemies instead of being essentially locked to a guns-only run. Hitting moving targets was pretty much an absolute crapshoot in my run, which was kinda a problem given that's the core aspect of the gameplay. The speeder doesn't even get a secondary weapon, as it's stuck with the iconic AT-AT tripping harpoon. You actually can find upgrades for the vehicles to improve attack/defense parameters as well as getting actual homing missiles, but the game doesn't really tell you that the upgrades exist in the first place and they are quite well-hidden so it's easy to completely overlook things that make the game significantly more digestible.
On the topic of the levels themselves, things were quite inconsistent. Sometimes, a level would be quite straightforward and after a few tries of grasping the objective and routing things properly I could clear it, and sometimes the levels are marathon gauntlets from hell that took hours to get through. None of the levels have checkpoints, so it makes those longer levels all the more punishing if you die like 10 minutes into a run because that's 10 minutes you aren't mfin getting back, loser. Specific shoutouts to the level where you need to protect a whole ass city juggling different time-sensitive objectives in the mfin speeder where killing AT-ATs takes 7 centuries from needing to loop around the legs so many times. Or the many, many escort missions, particularly the one where you need to protect this random mfin ship as it slowly bumbles around four prisons collecting passengers for 10 minutes while you get pelted by TIE interceptors and SAM turrets the whole time. And let's not forget the penultimate second-to-last level where you need to destroy every single enemy unit on the map while the game just throws as much shit as it can at you, to the point where you spawn in right in front of an active homing missile cannon because fuck you I guess. Call it a skill issue or whatever but I just found this game absolutely aggravating to play through.
And that sucks! because this game does a lot of really cool things too! I really like the visuals, the fact that they were able to use the expansion pak to run the game at 480i without adding much slowdown is really impressive! There's a hefty amount of voice acting and the audio is really good due to factor 5s incredibly impressive audio compression on N64! The draw distance is really far and there's still a ton of detail in the worlds and lighting! There are tons of fun little cheat codes like the famous hidden naboo starfighter and the goofy flying car that replaces the V-wing! It has that feeling of being made by a small team that cared about what they were doing and had a decent amount of fun doing so, which pains me all the more to be filtered by it so much...
In all honesty if they put checkpoints in the longer levels and balanced the capabilities of the vehicles to more closely match what the missions demand for, this would be a banger for sure. Maybe there are mods for the PC version that do just that, I have no idea. I partly played this to hype myself up to play the sequels on gamecube, but after struggling through this game I'm def a bit weary to give those an earnest go... Maybe they will fix the problems this game had?
I wanted to like this game a lot, due to both me being a reasonable enough fan of arcade dogfighting games as well as how much I admire factor 5s insane technical prowess, but shit man the balance is too off for me to really say I enjoyed myself here.
It really didn't feel like the vehicles were designed around the levels or vice versa, as each of the five main vehicles felt like they were more designed for air-to-ground combat rather than air-to-air, with maybe the exception of the V-wing? Each vehicles primary method of attack is the laser blaster cannon doohickeys, and the laser beams they shoot are slow and only shoot straight, and every vehicle except the speeder has an extremely limited supply of either static rockets or bombs as a secondary weapon. As someone used to games like Ace Combat, I was yearning for some homing missiles to actually pressure airborne enemies instead of being essentially locked to a guns-only run. Hitting moving targets was pretty much an absolute crapshoot in my run, which was kinda a problem given that's the core aspect of the gameplay. The speeder doesn't even get a secondary weapon, as it's stuck with the iconic AT-AT tripping harpoon. You actually can find upgrades for the vehicles to improve attack/defense parameters as well as getting actual homing missiles, but the game doesn't really tell you that the upgrades exist in the first place and they are quite well-hidden so it's easy to completely overlook things that make the game significantly more digestible.
On the topic of the levels themselves, things were quite inconsistent. Sometimes, a level would be quite straightforward and after a few tries of grasping the objective and routing things properly I could clear it, and sometimes the levels are marathon gauntlets from hell that took hours to get through. None of the levels have checkpoints, so it makes those longer levels all the more punishing if you die like 10 minutes into a run because that's 10 minutes you aren't mfin getting back, loser. Specific shoutouts to the level where you need to protect a whole ass city juggling different time-sensitive objectives in the mfin speeder where killing AT-ATs takes 7 centuries from needing to loop around the legs so many times. Or the many, many escort missions, particularly the one where you need to protect this random mfin ship as it slowly bumbles around four prisons collecting passengers for 10 minutes while you get pelted by TIE interceptors and SAM turrets the whole time. And let's not forget the penultimate second-to-last level where you need to destroy every single enemy unit on the map while the game just throws as much shit as it can at you, to the point where you spawn in right in front of an active homing missile cannon because fuck you I guess. Call it a skill issue or whatever but I just found this game absolutely aggravating to play through.
And that sucks! because this game does a lot of really cool things too! I really like the visuals, the fact that they were able to use the expansion pak to run the game at 480i without adding much slowdown is really impressive! There's a hefty amount of voice acting and the audio is really good due to factor 5s incredibly impressive audio compression on N64! The draw distance is really far and there's still a ton of detail in the worlds and lighting! There are tons of fun little cheat codes like the famous hidden naboo starfighter and the goofy flying car that replaces the V-wing! It has that feeling of being made by a small team that cared about what they were doing and had a decent amount of fun doing so, which pains me all the more to be filtered by it so much...
In all honesty if they put checkpoints in the longer levels and balanced the capabilities of the vehicles to more closely match what the missions demand for, this would be a banger for sure. Maybe there are mods for the PC version that do just that, I have no idea. I partly played this to hype myself up to play the sequels on gamecube, but after struggling through this game I'm def a bit weary to give those an earnest go... Maybe they will fix the problems this game had?