Star Wars: Rebel Assault

The Good
The main reason to buy or play Rebel Assault, which is why I originally bought it, is to play a starfighter pilot. And this game lets you do just that - play a rebel pilot (which is referred to in the game's soundtrack as "rookie one").

Lucasarts managed to capture the feeling of the movies perfectly. You get to fight TIE-fighters in an asteroid field, shoot down a star destroyer, have a shoot-out with imperial stormtroopers, destroy an AT-AT walker, and expreience the famous Deathstar trench run. All this to the incredible sound of John Williams' original Star Wars soundtrack, professionaly produced movies and cutscenes, and incredible CGI effects - all thanks to the video backdrop, which ran amazingly well, concidering the technology of the time, and the amount of data that needs to be streamed of the CD.

The gameplay was fun as well, and not to hard at all. Granted, some sections ARE hard, but if you persevere - you will be rewarded by beautiful cutscenes, and more great play. The gameplay is varied - sometimes you will have to quickly and accurately shoot fighters or

people, sometimes you will have to navigate narrow canyons. Sometimes both.

All in all, the game is fun to play - and captures the feeling of the Star Wars movies.

The Bad
As always with this sort of games - the gameplay is extremely linear. Absolutely nothing changes from game to game. And there is no replay value at all - once you finished the game, there is little point to play it again.

Also, instead of a save game system, rebel assault has a password system. The game is devided to 15 scenes, and after every 3, you are given a password to the next scenes. This is very disappointing, especially when you finish a particulary hard scene, get no password, and find out you have to finish it all over again because you run out of lives at the next scene.

The Bottom Line
Today you have much better games that let you experience Star Wars, but
Rebel Assault was the first game that had such a feeling of immersion. Rebel Assault did quite well at the stores, and spawned a sequel, and many video backdrop games such as Cyberia and Novastorm.