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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Force is almost with this one..., 4 Dec 2003
Along time ago...about a year and a half, to be more exact, I purchased my Gamecube (black) a day after it's release (I would have got it on it's release but they had sold out) and with it I got the only decent game worth buying - Star Wars Rogue Leader, the sequel the the original Rogue Squadron on the N64. I got home and set-up my Cube. When i switched on and the logo came up i waited quietly when...BANG on exploded the most amazing game ever with astounding graphics and sound that to this day i will never forget, I played it for months to come and evenually got all gold and ace medals.
Over a year later I opened up Rebel Strike, the long awaited next installment and instead of a bang when i switched the Cube on i was treated to a comical dance routine in the style of Saturday Night Fever performed by the film's main characters, at first this worried me but then i liked it. The layout of the game had a very familiar feeling. It reminded me of when i first bought my Cube.After I entered my name in the file space 'JAK', the name i have used for all Rogue Squadron games, i proceeded to the first mission 'Revenge Of The Empire'. Straight away i remembered the amazing visuals, but to my surprise they didn't seem that amazing anymore, even though the graphics have been given a boost with the new engine enabling such graphical tweaks like light scattering, it didn't really have an affect on me, i was too used to the graphics to care. But it was when i went back to Rogue Leader that i noticed the game does actually look a bit ugly without these new effects, so i was wrong! The character models do look nice, but as a new feature (the running missions) i expected the characters to run fast and look solid, but they are clunky and out of place. The new graphical updates do overall make the game look polished and smooth. When you shoot a large vehicle huge amounts of debris fly in all directions, something that makes destroying things that bit more satisfying. The only major problem i have with the look of the game is (i don't know if its just me but) i find everything is out of proportion, things such as ships and AT-ATs don't seem as big as they should be. The game still has the familiar 'pick up and play' feeling to it and straight away i felt as though i could achieve gold medal status. Although the arial missions are still a blast, the major dissapointment of the game had to be the on-foot missions, but they didn't seem to be as bad as they were made out to be. The why the missions are laid out seem to puzzle me, i actually got lost on the mission select screen...GOT LOST! The sound is another thing that has been inproved over Leader, is now incorperates less of the cheesey, synthesized music and more of the real orchestrated stuff. I havn't tested it on surround sound so though. The co-op mode is a good inclusion to the game and it brouight back memories of my first time playing Leader. The versus mode i found to be a bit boring, it would have been better if it supported more than 2 players. Overall i found this game very entertaining if you are a Star Wars fan (like me) then you will still enjoy this game, but the fact that it bases itself on the films very heavily will put off casual players. Even though it doesn't match Rogue Leader's supperior quality, it dtill does retain the amazement (only just).
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