Rebel Assault I & II

I have to be honest, even though I've liked the Star Wars movies ever since I was a kid, I wasn't exactly a die-hard fan, until I was in my teens. So as far as the gaming was concerned... well, it didn't concern me. My first experience with the computer game off-shoots of George Lucas' financial empire, came in the mid-nineties, when my dad bought a CD-ROM drive for our computer at the time, and one of the free discs was a three-level sample version of Rebel Assault II. I'm not sure I'd say I was blown away, but I was intrigued... so when game developer LucasArts came out with a collection of several Star Wars discs, including full versions of BOTH Rebel Assault games, I was in.

These games have somewhat fallen into obscurity, so I'll fill you in (and for simplicity's sake I'm going to review both games in this one article). Both games take place in a sort of parallel universe to the classic trilogy -- so while there's a Darth Vader, Emperor, Princess Leia, etc. there is no Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. This is particularly apparent in the first game, where you take the role of "Rookie One" (yes, that's the only name we get). Rookie One is a wide-eyed farm boy* who joins the heroic Rebel Alliance as a hot-shot pilot, and after blowing up asteroids, flying through canyons, and shooting TIE Fighters left and right, eventually has to destroy the Death Star.

* (in the first game, the option exists to play Rookie One as a man or a woman -- this is not the case in the sequel, for reasons that will become apparent)

In Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire, Rookie One is assigned to investigate the disappearance of several ships in an area of space called The Dreighton Triangle. It turns out that the Empire is processing a rare ore, that fuels a new class of TIEs that are effectively invisible. As you might have guessed, eventually you have to meet up with Rookie One's former CO to track down and destroy the flagship carrying all of these fighters, before they can be used on the Rebels en masse.

The gameplay approach for this series is pretty much a rail-riding arcade-style shooter, presented as an interactive movie. In other words, there are tons of cutscenes, and even the parts that the player has any control over, limit you solely to where you can shoot pre-arranged targets, or where you fly a ship within a frame. All other particulars about where you're going and what you're doing, are taken care of automatically by the game -- so while it's a nice diversion, I wouldn't call it particularly engaging.

In keeping with this approach, the levels are designed to be short and shallow shooting fests, which I might not mind too much but they have a tendency to be repetitive and not have much to do with the story. This is especially apparent in Rebel Assault I, where you will often do laps of a given course, until you've destroyed everything that you're supposed to destroy... or run around mazes for no apparent reason, with no way of knowing how to get out of them.

"All too easy."

I freely admit that my gaming skills are not especially high, but some of my issues with the first game very much come from the controls (incidentally, you can play either game with a mouse or joystick, though the second game also allows for keyboard control). Once again, I'm not sure what anyone was thinking, but the mouse/joystick sensitivity in  Rebel I is ridiculously high. You know your game has issues, when the first level is extremely hard to survive, for reasons that have nothing to do with the difficulty setting -- like the freaking controls being so sloppy and loose that it makes it look like I've downed a bottle of Screech! So never mind hitting the broad side of a Star Destroyer, you have a hard time flying anywhere but straight down!

Thank the Force, by the time the sequel came around, they'd found a programmer who knows what a straight line is supposed to look like, because it's a LOT easier to be precise and fluid in Rebel II. There's also a bit more variety and sense to the missions (so, for instance, you have plausible reason to get out of your ship and blast stormtroopers, and no maze-running that will bone you at random).

There's not a lot to choose between these two games, graphics wise, though Rebel II is slightly better here, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, as you might imagine, the various structures you see are a lot crisper and more photorealistic (frankly there are better visual effects in this game, than some parts of the prequels). For another thing, while the second game uses live-action video for most cutscenes (hence why Rookie One is stuck as a guy in the sequel), the first game uses this weird hybrid of hand-drawn animation and some sort of Photoshopping, to portray the characters. Leaving aside that jumping between the two art styles is FAR from seamless, there are characters who look like some sort of deformed puppets when they talk. Then there's Darth Vader, whose scenes in the first game are pulled right out of a still frame from The Empire Strikes Back (when he's sitting in his meditation chamber/bathroom), and his only movement is a slight shuffling of his head.

It's a similar story, with the sound. While the effects are largely the same, between games, there is one choice in the first game that has always annoyed me. You see, pretty much all of the sound effects are pulled right from the Star Wars movies, or at least designed in such a way that they sound somewhat like real machines/explosions/etc. But for some reason, the shipboard lasers fired by the player sound HORRIBLY synthesized. There is literally NO excuse for this -- the same laser sounds used in the movies, appear whenever anyone else fires weapons; if the creators were worried about the player not being able to tell which sounds came from him/her... which would imply that the player is either blind or deaf, making the entire issue moot... simply making the player's laser a little bit louder than the others, would take care of that. Once again, this issue was (thankfully) remedied in the second game. The only other thing of note, is that while score for Rebel II uses music from the whole original trilogy, Rebel I only uses music from the first movie -- which is a bit odd, but not really something worth complaining about.

It's really hard to sum this up. To varying degrees, both games are satisfying popcorn, but they're so shallow and detached that I'm not even sure if it's right to just call them comfort food (maybe if you grew up playing a lot of Dragon's Lair, or something). The first game is so exasperating that unless you're a wizard with a joystick, you will have to cheat just to make it playable, but at least the second game is designed with some sanity -- so if you can only play one, I'd very much recommend Rebel Assault II for that reason alone. Since both games have been out of print for ages, I guess you would have to go on eBay or something, to find a copy. It may be worth checking out, just as a light example of the CD-ROM/interactive movie fad in 90s gaming.