Star Wars: Rebel Assault
Sega CD
Nostalgia Factor:
My 400th video game review! Since Star Wars is one of my most reviewed gaming franchises (I've reviewed ten Star Wars games during the lifespan of this blog), I decided to honor it with my 400th review. You're welcome, Star Wars. I'm sure you appreciate this prestigious honor.
As a Genesis owner I was always fascinated by the Sega CD and its library of FMV based games. One of the main reasons I wanted to get a Sega CD was because of this game - Star Wars: Rebel Assault. Although my family would never be able to afford a Sega CD, I always knew that if I had the means to play this game someday I would find a way to do so.
That day has finally come. Would it be worth the long, long wait? Spoiler alert: not really. But read on for all of my thoughts.
Story:
Rebel Assault takes place during the events of the first two Star Wars movies. You play as an unnamed rookie pilot working for the Rebel Alliance. The first few stages of this game are training missions, before you are thrust into action on Tatooine.
This game takes some liberties with Star Wars canon, and I'm okay with that. For example, there is a Rebel base on Tatooine in this game, and as a fighter pilot you have to scramble to its defense as the Empire attacks it while simultaneously searching for the Death Star plans at the same time. You take the fight to the Star Destroyer before eventually escaping through an asteroid field. None of this happens in A New Hope, but due to the nature of the game I had no problems with them taking liberties with its story. You have to cram in as much action as possible, or what's the point? And who knows, maybe these things did actually happen, but just weren't shown in A New Hope because everything was focused on Luke and his friends. A huge stretch, I know.
A weird liberty I can't explain is the fact that the battle of Hoth takes place before the assault on the first Death Star. Like I said I can't really explain that one, but it is what it is. You just have to roll with it. The game ends, as expected, with the destruction of the Death Star. Instead of Luke Skywalker firing the kill shot, it's you - the unnamed rookie. Definitely changes the canon of Star Wars a bit, but seeing as how all these changes are contained to this one game, I can't complain too much. Simply flying cover for Luke would have been very boring. Who doesn't want to be the one to fire the shot that blows up the Death Star?
Gameplay:
This isn't a fun game. I'm going to get that out of the way right now. Most missions are what you would classify as "rail shooting" missions. What that means is that you fly on a set path, and you only have minimal control over what is going on with your ship. You mainly just control the cursor of where you are firing and the direction of the ship. For example, the first stage has you flying on a set path through a canyon. You can move the ship up and down or left and right to avoid crashing into the canyon's walls, but you don't have free range of movement. Like, you can't fly out of the canyon or turn yourself around if you wanted to. You can't even hit the brakes or stop your forward motion. You are always moving ahead. Other missions have you flying forward while you control the cursor on the screen as you fire away at enemies. Moving the cursor to the left or right slightly moves you in that direction, but really you are going on a set course straight forward with little control over your actual flight path.
This might sound okay to some people. Stat Fox 64 has missions like the ones I just described, and I heaped copious amounts of praise onto that game. Why is it different here? The controls. The controls are terrible. Simply flying your ship through a canyon shouldn't be as difficult as it is here. You are constantly being pulled around on the screen, seemingly at random. Just keeping your ship in the middle of the screen, away from the canyon walls, is a difficult chore.
Other levels are excessively easy and can be beaten with no trouble whatsoever. You move a cursor around on the screen and you shoot at targets. Woop-de-doo. The next level, the difficulty will spike and you'll be stuck - wasting 20 lives to try and get through it before finally succeeding. Then the next level will be super easy again. The game just can't make up its mind.
Two levels stand out to me as being outrageously frustrating. The training stage on Yavin - where you have to zip through a canyon while shooting targets on the ground is one of these stages. To keep your ship afloat, you have to constantly crank it upwards, or you lose control and slam into the canyon walls. But the targets you have to shoot are on the canyon floor. How can you stay low and shoot something on the ground when you have to pull up constantly to keep from crashing your ship? Very annoying. It took me a countless number of attempts to make it through this level. The other outrageously frustrating stage takes place on the surface of the Death Star. You have to skim around on the surface, shooting towers, lasers, and other Death Star defense mechanisms. But the game slows to a crawl here, becoming choppy and nearly unplayable. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason when it came to taking damage. I could be playing what I thought was a flawless run and then all of a sudden 75% of my health disappears in an instant. WTF? It took me dozens and dozens of attempts to get through this one level, through what I considered to be no fault of my own. Eventually I resorted to using save states and saving after every enemy I destroyed, in order to get through it. Completely unacceptable.
There were some missions I liked and considered to be fun, such as the Hoth missions, the Star Destroyer assault, or any mission that took place on foot. These missions were few and far between however. And I would consider "fun" tp be a relative term. Maybe fun compared to the rest of this steaming turd of a game, but on its own extremely shallow and lacking in substance.
Graphics:
I'm sure that for its time, this was considered a very good looking game. But by present day's standards? Yikes. Normally I'm willing to give older games a mulligan simply because of the technology that was available at the time these games were made. Look at my last review for Evil Dead: Hail to the King as an example. But this game just looks so bad to me. It's incredibly grainy and choppy. It's clear that it is overly reliant on playing around with the "newfangled" FMV-type technology than actually producing something that looks good. I understand wanting to capture the cinematic feel of the original Star Wars movies, but Rebel Assault fails on nearly every level.
Even the cutscenes in between stages are bad. They keep a lot of footage from the movie, but replace the characters' faces with moving animations that look just so horribly out of place. I almost bust out laughing several times when making my way through this game.
Sound:
Normally you can count on Star Wars games to provide quality music and sound effects, but Rebel Assault is pretty much a failure on this account as well. The voice acting is terrible. The music, while decent, only features extremely short clips as you are playing through each level. If a song ends while you are halfway through a level, there will be an audible pause for a few seconds before it starts up again from the beginning. Thirty seconds later, it happens again. And again. You can tell these are only short clips being played on a constant loop, and as a fan of the series I almost feel insulted by this.
Sound effects are okay, I guess. You really can't go wrong with the sound of blasters and explosions, can you?
Overall:
In case you couldn't tell by my breakdown, I didn't like this game. Aside from a few somewhat enjoyable stages, nearly everything about this is bad. I don't think I've ever played a worse Star Wars game in my life.
If you're a loyal reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I played and reviewed Rebel Assault II for the PS1 approximately five years ago. You can read that review here. While Rebel Assault II shares a lot of gameplay traits with its predecessor, for the most part I liked that game. Even gave it a B-. This game is NOT going to get a B-. What makes it so much worse than its sequel, even though they share a lot of the same issues?
It's hard to say, considering I haven't played that game in over five years. But going from memory I would have to say that it lies in its polish. Rebel Assault II felt like a fun, exciting, new chapter in the Star Wars universe. The graphics were good. The music was good. The overall presentation was very strong. It even had an interesting storyline and strong characters to keep you interested. There were also far fewer frustrating, nearly impossible stages to be found. The gameplay on the whole is very similar to what you see in the first Rebel Assault, but a lot of its flaws were masked by bigger and better things.
Without that mask, the original Rebel Assault falls flat on its face. I can't say I will ever come back and play this one again, and for obvious reasons. It's just not a good game. Maybe if I had played this on the Sega CD back in the day, I'd be singing a different tune. But to me, this is just terrible. I really wanted to give it an F, but despite its flaws I wouldn't say the game is a 100% failure. Pretty darn close though.
THE GRADE:
D-
Is it possible to give it a D--?
A complete listing of all of my other Star Wars game reviews:
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