Still quite incredible to look at even 19 years later. One of the graphical showcases of the GameCube as a launch title. Production values just off the charts. Great music, sound design, and voice actors, not that those things are hard to reproduce from the movie side of things. But they put in the work to get all that stuff and those actors, and it's all employed well here.

The gameplay is great. The controls are good and the game is deeper than I realized. In first person view, you can look around the cockpit. Your fighter crosshairs help you lead targets. Your lasers are stronger when that goofy bar is charged (never knew what that thing represented when I was a kid). I was also happy when I realized you can slowly turn if you hold both shoulder buttons. Oops! Didn't know that.

Overall, the combat looks and feels and sounds great. It's the game design and level design that bog this one down.

Missions are short--some may run you only 5 minutes. But there is no way to recover health during a mission, and some of the playable fighters take such limited damage before being destroyed that they're essentially worthless in my opinion. Even the ones with a little more defense go down somewhat easily, and if you lose 3 lives, you get sent back to the main menu.

When I think of frustrating game design, this is part of it. You lost all your lives, okay fine. If you fail a mission by not meeting a required objective, the game at least offers you a chance to restart the mission from the beginning. But if you lose all your lives, which happens a lot, you have to go back to the main menu, load your profile, select your mission, load the hangar, select an aircraft, and load the mission. I know this game came out in 2001, but this is unforgivable. For crying out loud, why don't they let you restart a mission when you run out of lives if they'll let you restart if you fail an objective?

To compound this problem, the game is fiendishly difficult. I browsed some of the reviews here before writing mine, and I'm glad I'm not alone. I stopped counting, for example, how many attempts I needed to beat the final Death Star mission, but it was upwards of 75 attempts and multiple days. It's frankly a little surprising how hard it was to beat some of these missions. I will say that I dabbled in a few walkthroughs just for some general hints or strategies to beat some missions that had me seriously stumped, and some of them were "D'oh, my fault. That makes sense." But some of them are just seriously challenging.

One gimmick of the game is there in the title: Rogue Leader. In this game, you get to give orders to your wingmen. I never noticed very much difference in what I told them to do. What this game needs is the Ace Combat 6 option where you can order them to shoot at the people shooting at you.

Ultimately, Rogue Leader is an absolute joy to play and look at even now. It's just extremely hard.

La secuela de uno de los mejores juegos del Nintendo 64 hace honor a sus orígenes y supera a su predecesor, ofreciendo acción, dificultad y una experiencia sobrecogedora en todos los aspectos de su apartado jugable. Rogue Leader aparte de contar con unas gráficas impresionantes y una banda sonora envidiable, también logra simular de la manera más real posible el control de todas las naves espaciales que tendremos bajo nuestro control (con un control de Game Cube, lo cual es excelente) y que forman parte del gran universo Star Wars. Es una compra obligada para todo seguidor de la saga, para todo aquel que haya disfrutado de la primera parte, y para todo aquel que guste de un buen simulador de combate aéreo. Factor 5 sigue demostrando que es muy bueno en lo que hace, con la compañía de Lucas Arts.

This is a definite improvement over Rogue Squadron 1, but this still has a good heap of problems. The main issue is that the game is terrible at directing you on your missions. There are so many missions where the instructions given to you just aren't clear enough, or are confusing. I like trial and error, but there's way too much of that here, and I don't think that fits this particular genre very well. Pretty much everything else here is luckily improved. The GameCube controller is a godsend compared to the N64 controller. This game is worth a shot, but it isn't anything amazing.

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!

One of my first Star Wars games and one of personal all-time favorites. God, this game is such a marvel, and despite being a launch title for the GameCube it looks absolutely stunning to this very day, to the point that even modern PC's can't emulate this game properly. That being said, God do I wish this got a rerelease so bad, or at least an HD collection of all 3 Rogue Squadron games to be put on modern platforms. I'd love nothing more, to be honest. But until then, this game will always hold a fond spot in my heart.