I've played quite a lot of Star Wars games over the year, and I've been something of a fan of Star Wars for quite a long time too. In my head, I always knew that this game was quite popular, so I've been meaning to play it for absolute ages, but it's only now that I've finally gotten to playing it. I'm not the biggest fan of flying games, but given that this was more arcadey than sim-like, I figured this would be okay for me. It was clearly okay for me enough to beat it, at least! XD. It took me about 9 hours to beat the game's 16 missions, and out of those I got 3 silver medals and 6 bronze medals. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

Rogue Squadron is the story of the titular squadron, who are a fighting unit in the Rebellion and then in the New Republic in the Star Wars expanded universe. This game has four chapters, with the first three having five missions and taking place in or around the respective first three Star Wars films, and the last chapter 4 only having one mission and taking place well after the 3rd film. You usually play as Luke Skywalker and it's following side stories around him specifically. The writing is nothing really amazing or exceptional, but it all makes for a fun time. This game exists to facilitate fun Star Wars Stuff, and the story does a very good job of allowing that.

The gameplay is a more arcadey approach to a flight sim. You play in a series of missions with their own specific objectives, and sometimes those objectives evolve and expand as you progress through the respective mission. Your flying is far from complicated as far as flight sims go, but it's a lot more complicated than something like Star Fox 64. There are even some upgrades you can find hidden in some missions to empower your arsenal even further. They're quite hard to find and generally very well hidden, so I'd recommend a guide to find them, but there was no way I was ever going to beat the game without them.

I'm not the biggest fan of this kind of game, and I'm also not super familiar with this kind of game in general, but with my limited experience with these kinds of things, I found it fairly well designed. That said, there are some design choices and hardware limitations that really harm the overall experience. The missions have basically no checkpoints outside of 4 respawn extra lives you get. Player information is also quite poor, as you only ever know your own health. The health of the thing(s) you're guarding, where objectives are at all, or even where missiles/shots are coming from is never made clear and it can make it very difficult to survive missions, let alone complete them. On top of all that, the very often poor framerate really makes the whole experience that much more frustrating than it already is. None of these are totally game breaking problems, but they definitely show just how badly the game has aged, and it'll all likely make for a very frustrating time for people more used to more recent (and better optimized) flying games.

The presentation of the game is, like the story, perfectly suited to facilitate fun Star Wars Stuff. All the ships you fly and fight against are just like they are in the movies and such. The voice overs and VA are good quality, and the sound-alikes they got for the characters from the films sound spot on. It's a bit of a shame that there's no Japanese VA, because I can only imagine how difficult it is playing a flying game while hurriedly reading subtitles, but at least that's something you can justify by saying that it makes it more like the films if we keep the original English voices. The music is also taken largely right from the films, and the presentation is really just what you'd want from a space-flying N64 Star Wars game.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I will fully admit that this just isn't a game for me, the technical issues of the hardware its on make it a pretty difficult game to recommend. If you're a fan of flying games or a BIG Star Wars fan, you very well might find this game a lot of fun, but if you're just looking for some casual Star Wars fun on the N64, this game is probably going to be quite a difficult game to get through, and it's likely going to be a pretty tough time to find fun with it as well.

man...

I wanted to like this game a lot, due to both me being a reasonable enough fan of arcade dogfighting games as well as how much I admire factor 5s insane technical prowess, but shit man the balance is too off for me to really say I enjoyed myself here.

It really didn't feel like the vehicles were designed around the levels or vice versa, as each of the five main vehicles felt like they were more designed for air-to-ground combat rather than air-to-air, with maybe the exception of the V-wing? Each vehicles primary method of attack is the laser blaster cannon doohickeys, and the laser beams they shoot are slow and only shoot straight, and every vehicle except the speeder has an extremely limited supply of either static rockets or bombs as a secondary weapon. As someone used to games like Ace Combat, I was yearning for some homing missiles to actually pressure airborne enemies instead of being essentially locked to a guns-only run. Hitting moving targets was pretty much an absolute crapshoot in my run, which was kinda a problem given that's the core aspect of the gameplay. The speeder doesn't even get a secondary weapon, as it's stuck with the iconic AT-AT tripping harpoon. You actually can find upgrades for the vehicles to improve attack/defense parameters as well as getting actual homing missiles, but the game doesn't really tell you that the upgrades exist in the first place and they are quite well-hidden so it's easy to completely overlook things that make the game significantly more digestible.

On the topic of the levels themselves, things were quite inconsistent. Sometimes, a level would be quite straightforward and after a few tries of grasping the objective and routing things properly I could clear it, and sometimes the levels are marathon gauntlets from hell that took hours to get through. None of the levels have checkpoints, so it makes those longer levels all the more punishing if you die like 10 minutes into a run because that's 10 minutes you aren't mfin getting back, loser. Specific shoutouts to the level where you need to protect a whole ass city juggling different time-sensitive objectives in the mfin speeder where killing AT-ATs takes 7 centuries from needing to loop around the legs so many times. Or the many, many escort missions, particularly the one where you need to protect this random mfin ship as it slowly bumbles around four prisons collecting passengers for 10 minutes while you get pelted by TIE interceptors and SAM turrets the whole time. And let's not forget the penultimate second-to-last level where you need to destroy every single enemy unit on the map while the game just throws as much shit as it can at you, to the point where you spawn in right in front of an active homing missile cannon because fuck you I guess. Call it a skill issue or whatever but I just found this game absolutely aggravating to play through.

And that sucks! because this game does a lot of really cool things too! I really like the visuals, the fact that they were able to use the expansion pak to run the game at 480i without adding much slowdown is really impressive! There's a hefty amount of voice acting and the audio is really good due to factor 5s incredibly impressive audio compression on N64! The draw distance is really far and there's still a ton of detail in the worlds and lighting! There are tons of fun little cheat codes like the famous hidden naboo starfighter and the goofy flying car that replaces the V-wing! It has that feeling of being made by a small team that cared about what they were doing and had a decent amount of fun doing so, which pains me all the more to be filtered by it so much...

In all honesty if they put checkpoints in the longer levels and balanced the capabilities of the vehicles to more closely match what the missions demand for, this would be a banger for sure. Maybe there are mods for the PC version that do just that, I have no idea. I partly played this to hype myself up to play the sequels on gamecube, but after struggling through this game I'm def a bit weary to give those an earnest go... Maybe they will fix the problems this game had?

El origen de la trilogía Squadron fue desarrollado para la poderosa Nintendo 64, y es sin duda alguna uno de los mejores títulos de la consola de 64 bits de Nintendo. Con unas gráficas sorprendentes para la época, una mecánica de juego excelente y un diseño de niveles con todo lo necesario, este título nos sumerge en el universo Star Wars como muy pocos, dándonos la posibilidad de pilotar todas y cada una de las míticas naves espaciales de la primera trilogía con todas sus especificaciones técnicas y todo su arsenal disponible. Es también un juego con un alto nivel de dificultad, más aún si se quieren conseguir todas las medallas doradas y salir vivo en el intento. Un juego que se recomienda mucho, y que forma parte de los tres juegos de Star Wars para la N64, que serán recordados para siempre por su alto nivel de calidad.

"Rogue Group, WHERE'S OUR COVERRRRR?"

I bought this game at a Media Play in Henrietta, a suburb of Rochester, NY, in 1998. I was three years old - it had an X-Wing on the cover and I knew I had to have it. Conveniently, my Dad also had a killer 3D Accelerator Card equipped PC, so it was a match made in heaven.

I have played Rogue Squadron 3D once yearly at minimum every year since that fateful day in 1998. It's levels, with their linear objectives and vast landscapes are burned into my brain; I know every hill and valley. Every hidden item. Every plot beat as each level unfolds, jam packed with dialogue and Star Wars Expanded Universe jargon. I have played the game on a dozen different desktops, laptops, and with at least 4 different joysticks, and yet I still find myself returning yearly.

To me, it is more than a game: it is a wave of memories. A tsunami of feelings and thoughts that stretch back through time. Yeah, its back half is spectacularly challenging in a way that its front half doesn't prepare you for, and yeah - that last mission with the World Devastators is pretty rough, but for me it transcends its faults and becomes something else entirely.

Peak console Star Wars flying game when it came out for the Nintendo 64 (expansion pack a must). It provided an incredible level and feel or realism based in the movies for a unique experience. Graphics were top notch for the time and art direction and themes were all carefully developed to remain faithful to the films and Star Wars universe.

Level design was good for the most part but there were a couple of annoyances such as convoy missions and the overall difficulty could be up there as well as unfair sections of the game with the combination of current and tie fighter surprise attacks.

All in all, it is a must-play for the fans of the movies and an important game that paved the game for the Gamecube Rogue games.

This game is great, if notably rough around the edges. Maybe I got the rose-tinted goggles on for this one, but it's just as much a blast these days as it was back in the day. The only problems I'd say it has is its love for turrets and anti-air missiles, and a pretty strict margin for error. TIE Interceptors will absolutely melt you from offscreen.

Oh, and the final main story level is pretty ass. A level that encompasses all of my nitpicks into one mindless sludge of a level to a point where I'm surprised it's not also another damn escort mission. But it DOES get quite possibly the lamest final boss that's ever been in a Star Wars game. Which feels like a far cry from the Star Destroyers I remember taking down in the sequel.

Still a great game. Maybe just turn on the infinite lives cheat for "Moff Seerdon's Revenge."

This is what I want my Star Wars games to be.

God damn it's so nice to be done with that era of mid-90s Star wars games where 3 quarters of them are horrible, we've finally hit the golden era of Star Wars video games, starting off with Rogue Squadron.

The story of this game is basically, they saw the ship combat in Shadows of the Empire and thought, hey, why don't we make a full game of that? And yep, it's even more fun than it was in Shadows of the Empire.

The atmosphere is perfect for what the game goes for, the game looks and sounds perfect.

Level design is coherent and it's always easy to understand what you need to do, where you're supposed to go, and how to accomplish your goals. Dog-fights feel fair and towards the end they can get a little challenging but it's never an unfair challenge. Generally though I found this to be a pretty easy game.

Through its 3-5 hour run-time, you'll see 16 levels all with extremely diverse worlds with completely unique textures and feels to them. I never got bored of this game, I was completely engaged the whole time.

The story is also simple but nice enough. It's a cool feeling to be a part of the legendary Rogue Squadron.

Now, the problems: I played the PC version on Steam, and there are a couple issues. First off, the camera is buggy, and won't follow you when you boost, an essential mechanic. The solution I found is to just use the closest up third person camera view as it doesn't glitch there. You also can't customize your controls as much as you'd like, Since this is running at 60 FPS or over, the ships when far away will kinda wobble around like a bee would, this doesn't happen on the N64 version. And my final complaint, hitboxes for buildings, terrain, etc. can be a little off, I'd sometimes try to fly over or next to a building, and indeed not hit the actual building, only to hit into it's invisible hitbox and die.

While the X-Wing and Tie Fighter series of games are far more advanced and have much more going on in them, I had more fun with Rogue Squadron. I didn't have to spend hours trying to learn how the game worked, I didn't have to spend hours messing with settings, I didn't die in one shot or repeatedly get put into completely unfair situations, I just started up the game, plugged in my controller, and had an awesome Star Wars adventure for a couple hours. And that's really all I want. Definitely play this one.

(See all my Star Wars Rankings and reviews on my profile here, the list is titled "Star Wars Ranked.")