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Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike Review - Gamecube

When the Nintendo GameCube was launched in Australia, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader was the fastest selling game on GameCube for two weeks. It made full use of the GameCube's capabilities and proved to be the closest Star Wars game to look and feel like the original trilogy, until now.

Gameplay

Rebel Strike, as its prequel did, lets you ride in the cockpit of some of the Star Wars universe's most famous spacecraft using either Luke Skywalker or Wedge Antilles as the pilot. You also control other team mates in most missions to assist you but how you use them is entirely up to you. The craft abilities do vary from ship to ship but they all handle well. You'll get craft with R2 units that repair your craft over time and you'll get craft that don?t have R2 units but have higher speed rates to make up for the loss in defense. You'll also get craft that have different secondary weapons (all of which have hidden upgrades) where some will be extremely powerful as opposed to weak, less useful secondary weapons but the main laser cannons are all usually fairly the same.

Single-player mode is a lot of fun and takes around one week to finish but will take months if you want to collect the gold or 'best ever' medals. The medals actually give you points for you to use to unlock certain missions and, depending on how well you play, can add some more life into the game for single-player aspects. Single-player mode solely consist of levels based on the original Star Wars movies but the developers of the game have taken the liberty to add some levels and even a story that was not mentioned in the movies. All the levels are very well designed and have different time zones as to how long the missions will go for. Some missions will require you to do a job that takes a few minutes whereas other missions will take longer to do and usually those are the missions that test your skills in the game. As for the AI in the game, they are well programmed, some are simple to defeat such as the Tie Fighters where as the Imperial Escort Carriers are tougher to defeat.

Factor Five have done a great job in creating the new ground base and first-person missions for Rebel Strike which is a first for the series. The different ground craft works and maneuvers greatly and rivals the flying based missions concordantly. You'll find yourself riding swoop bikes through forest and even walking through Imperial installations in an AT-ST! It is truly a well-worked and thoroughly thought through design. In first-person missions, there is an automatic lock-on system that can get annoying when you're shooting at stormtroopers as you happen to lock-on one that is behind a rock while in the process, losing accuracy points every time you shoot. Also when a stormtrooper or another (continued next page)