Game #1121: Star Wars Rogue Squadron III - Rebel Strike

 

 And you thought Star Wars Kinect was the first time Han Solo danced.

 My taste in videogames has changed since I was younger. RPGs and Metroidvanias are still my favorite, but I don't like fighting games as much, and I have discovered a newfound love for Survival Horror as well as taken a liking to some racing games. But one thing remains the same: I don't like dogfighting games. I have tried Ace Combat as well as a few others, but... they don't seem to gel very well with me. My best friend during my schooldays owned Rogue Squadron on the N64 and believe you me, I gave it many, many tries. But I heard that Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike had on-foot sections that looked interesting, albeit I was prepared before-hand and knew they were bad, plus, it's a Gamecube Exclusive, so the planets aligned and I took the plunge. And maybe I shouldn't have.

 The introductory reel, with the company brandings and the such, starts off with the cast from Star Wars dancing to the Star Wars theme song, and that definitely set the tone for what was to come. The game is three campaigns in one, sorta. There's a cooperative mode that features every level from Rogue Squadron II, which is pretty neat, although I didn't get to try it since I wouldn't subject my sister or my girlfriend to playing a game I didn't like. Then there's the single player mode, which consists of about 20 stages, give or take. Some follow the plot from the original trilogy, including footage from the movies themselves, and others follow a separate plot that runs parallel to the original plot, albeit playing as Wedge instead of Luke, Han or Leia. Progress in Single Player is gated through Medals, which sucks if you suck like me, but there's an 'unlock every stage' code which I used. I'm sure I could spend time to learn every stage and get decent at them and thus progress through the game.... but I don't like the genre and didn't care to, I just wanted to experience the entire game at my leisure. You can also unlock ports of three old Star Wars Arcade games, which is a cool little extra.

 Something I found quite interesting, is that most missions are made up of about three sections. And between sections the location may change, maybe you'll go from space to inside a planet's atmosphere or even get out of your vehicle and go on-foot. Aerial fights felt a bit sloppy, at least in my opinion, but they work well for what they are. Although I had two caveats. Firstly, you can't change the Y axis aiming, so you have to deal with reverse controls: Up aims down and vice-versa. Secondly... sometimes the game is too vague about what you have to do. In one mission I had to use Ion Lasers to incapacitate a vehicle, a prompt pressing the B button appeared. I pressed B but I had ran out of missiles, was I screwed? Maybe holding down B? Nothing. I lost all three lives and had to restart the mission, but a tip in the Game Over screen told me to hold down B until the aiming reticule turned blue. Would've been nice to know beforehand! Another time you have to destroy a shield generator. How it looks like? Who knows. But whatever, there were two of them and one was blown apart, so I figured I had to destroy the other one, and then the game told me to destroy the one below it. Below on the Star Destroyer's Surface? Below the Star Destroyer? Nothing else on the ship looked like the generator I blew up, so what was I supposed to do? Yeah... I didn't have a fun time.

 But it got worse, at last the latter I'd argue that I felt like besides the lack of direction, the gameplay worked well, it was only boring because I don't like this genre, but then I got out of my ship as Luke and... Oh. My. God. It's a very sloppy shooter, characters move all over the place, you can only roll if you crouch, the auto-aim is very rudimentary, you can't even strafe and you have to deal with fixed camera angles. They play like hot garbage. And you'd think once you get the lightsaber, in three missions total, it'd get better, but it's even worse, you don't even have a 3 or 2 hit combo with the saber. And you get a Jedi double jump that barely works given the fixed camera angles and slippery controls, and the game wants you to do platforming over the Sarlacc Pitts... yeah, no, the on-foot sections only make the game worse.

 Between the fact that I don't enjoy vehicle combat games and the fact that it has some truly awful on-foot sections I can't say that I enjoyed my time with Rogue Squadron III. At least I'm willing to accept that the shooting works, I didn't enjoy it very much, but I can understand how someone could. This one's one I probably won't be revisiting any time soon.

 5.5