Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is a shooter for the N64. Building on the excellent ideas started in Star Wars: X-Wing, the game has you playing as Luke Skywalker, but rather than using a lightsaber or blaster, you're flying a wide range of Republic spaceships, including X-Wings, A-Wings, and Y-Wings. The plot of the game takes place primarily during the IV-VI timeline of the story, but focuses on an alternate storyline that occurs in parallel to the events of the films.
Unlike the crushingly difficult and oddly sim-like nature of the Star Wars: X-Wing games, this one takes a more arcade-like approach. Gone are the ability to max out the power of your lasers, thrusters, and shields, shift your shields from front to back, as well as the unfortunate reality of only having one life and being captured by the Empire seemingly every time you die, necessitating you to begin your campaign anew! Here you get a far more friendly amount of times you can get shot by enemies, a simpler control interface, and three lives per mission! Woah!
In addition to the more user friendly improvements, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is also a more strikingly beautiful game than its PC ancestors. Unlike the PC games, the battles here take place on planets rather than above them or in the middle of space, allowing the developers to play around a lot more with different surroundings and environments. Some levels here take place on watery worlds with large seas filled with naval opponents, while another takes place inside a volcano. Games from this era typically don't age terribly well in terms of their visuals, but this one is rather nice looking today. It certainly isn't as polished looking as the aerial combat in, say Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the brand new and inferior one), but you really won't notice many warts in the crafts. The surroundings could certainly look better, but it's a standout for this generation in terms of graphics.
The game also has excellent music and sound, with the songs being based primarily on the John Williams soundtracks, as you would hope. There are a few songs here that I didn't recognize, but they all work pretty well for the game. Their is legitimate voice acting here, which is a bit of a rarity for the N64. There's pretty extensive cutscenes with professional voice work, and it works nicely to advance the story along.
The combat is fun and engaging, with lots of different missions/spaceships with which to play. Each ship controls differently and is fun in its own way, although, as usual in most games in this genre, the more maneuverable crafts tend to be the ones that are the most rewarding to play and easiest with which to win. The Y-Wing in particular is pretty awful, particularly on the volcano level, which is nearly impossible to beat with the craft.
The game really would have benefited from a two player co-op mode, in which one player could play as the fighter class of ship, while the other plays a bomber. Then you'd have to work together to protect the bomber to get to your target, which would have been a nice feature, particularly on the extremely co-op friendly N64. The game is pretty graphically intensive for the time, however, so I can see why they didn't do this.
Some of the missions are a little dull, and definitely feel like a grind to complete. The system with which you receive medals depending on your performance, however, incentivizes you to repeatedly play through your favorites to try to get better medals, which is a nice touch.
If you like Star Wars: X-Wing, you will probably like this as well. It's definitely its more casual cousin, but who said casual was a dirty word? Everybody enjoys some casual games, and this is definitely slotted to fit well in most people's N64 library. It's fun to turn on and play a mission or two, and can definitely be beaten in a few days with a little dedication. I'll give it an 8.2/10.
Up next on the home console edition of What I'm Playing is a game that's technically impossible to beat, so I'm just going to beat it to my own definitions. Check out the teaser below...
-TRO
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