Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II - Rogue Leader

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II - Rogue Leader

released on Nov 09, 2001

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II - Rogue Leader

released on Nov 09, 2001

In Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader you get the chance to jump into the cockpit of an X-wing and join Luke Skywalker and the Star Wars galaxy's most daring pilots as they return to face off against the Empire. As in the original hit game for N64, you'll relive favorite Star Wars battles including the perilous Death Star trench run, a daring space attack on a Star Destroyer and the legendary battle on the ice planet Hoth. Rogue Leader features stunning, movie like visuals and immerses players in an intense action-arcade experience. Aerial conflict takes place in a variety of craft such as the legendary X-wing, A-wing, and B-wing. For the first time, the game also features on-foot ground combat in missions directly based on or inspired by the original movie trilogy.


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Spent way too many hours on tatooine blowing up womp rats

Review in progress:
Very impressive graphics for the time. There's a good amount of variety in the mission design. As far as arcade flight games go, this is fairly well done. Captures the Star Wars atmosphere well.

Unfortunately, Rogue Squadron II is incredibly difficult, and not always in a hard-but-fair way. Mission objectives are often unclear. The tutorial mission does a poor job of preparing you for the rest of the game and only goes over the basic mechanics. You'll frequently be killed in 1-2 seconds by enemies off-screen with almost no time to react (especially in the squishy A-wing). There's a ton of trial and error involved, and victories often feel unsatisfying as a result.

The difficulty is wildly inconsistent between missions, which is poor design. Instead of a gradually increasing difficulty curve, there are often very hard missions followed by laughably easy ones. The AI partners are completely useless. I never felt like they were helping me out and giving them different commands never made a tangible impact on the mission's success. The lack of a health meter on structures you're trying to defend is very frustrating and leads to many unexpected mission failures. If having a visual indicator for damage is too "gamey", then they could've at least had more frequent radio chatter indicating that something is going to be destroyed soon. That only happens for some of the targets.

I can't help but wonder if the brutal difficulty was a way of artificially padding out the short completion length. Rogue Squadron II feels like an NES game in that respect. It would've been nice to have a "normal" difficulty option. The difficulty doesn't feel integral to the game design in the same way as something like Dark Souls. At the very least, they could've done a much better job of communicating with the player. I shouldn't need to consult a guide to figure out what I'm even doing wrong. How was I supposed to know that the B-Wing needed to be closed in order to avoid taking insane amounts of damage or that the air balloons could be taken out by aiming at the top part? The targeting computer doesn't even highlight it!

weird that i never heard of star wars again after this. someone should revive the franchise

Insanely difficult for kid me, never beat the first level. Still amazing tho

Quite liked this one, it has a very good framerate, but I just couldn't pass the first level.

this could be a skill issue, but I really didn't care for this at all. I was stuck on the first mission and constantly redoing the tedious tasks to get to the part where I kept dying was really boring. In general even if I continued I don't think this game would've won me over.