It's Star Wars with great controls. Shoot stuff, explode, curse, shoot stuff.
I gave up and came back to this game a lot of times. It's extremely hard, so my lack of patience prevented me from having long play sessions. But it's legitimately good. Enough to make even someone super stressed like me want to finish it.
Spent way too many hours on tatooine blowing up womp rats
weird that i never heard of star wars again after this. someone should revive the franchise
Quite liked this one, it has a very good framerate, but I just couldn't pass the first level.
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.
you could play as a car
Im terrible at it but its stuff fun to reenact and play these missions
My favourite of the Rogue Squadron series. It's pretty hard, so I've never beaten it, but even just replaying levels to shoot down TIE fighters and fighting a Star Destroyer in an X-Wing is so addictive. If the later levels were more balanced, this could be a 10/10 game.
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!
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!
Insanely difficult for kid me, never beat the first level. Still amazing tho
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.
With one of the most impressive launch titles of its time coupled with one of the most impressive first levels in gaming, Star Wars: RS2 remains as one of the must-haves games in the GameCube library and a must-play for Star Wars fans.
Graphically, this game set the bar for a new generation of consoles and still managed to look great years upon years after its release. This game it's an overall improvement over the N64 Rogue Squadron game. Level and mission design is not super consistent, there are some frustrating missions and design decisions that sour the experience in a couple of areas but the overall package of this game makes it one of the most fun pilot-fighter games out there.
Graphically, this game set the bar for a new generation of consoles and still managed to look great years upon years after its release. This game it's an overall improvement over the N64 Rogue Squadron game. Level and mission design is not super consistent, there are some frustrating missions and design decisions that sour the experience in a couple of areas but the overall package of this game makes it one of the most fun pilot-fighter games out there.