Blast from the past: Rebel Assault II
How’s this for a blast from the past: Rebel Assault II! Did anyone else play this game as a kid? I know I did, and I remember hours and hours of fun.
I don’t know what reminded me of it, but the other day I felt the need to reinstall it and play it again, nearly 15 years after its 1995 release date. So I did! Like any good 1980s or 90s game, it has levels so tough that you wonder if the designers were really sadists. But that was just the style back then, and it’s an interesting transition coming from games where you get released from the city hospital free of charge after eating a few dozen slugs. Rebel Assault II was created far before that time, and it shows. Many of the missions are torturously difficult, requiring you to basically memorize the pattern of obstacles or the location of enemy stormtroopers.
One of the things I’m struck by is the innovative control styles. In the first mission, for example, you’re in the cockpit of a B-Wing blasting TIE fighters from a first-person perspective, with the computer doing most of the movement and you concentrating on shooting. The next mission has you blowing away stormtroopers in the third person, darting from cover to cover. Right after that, you pilot the Millennium Falcon in the third person (and it’s every bit as responsive as the movies have led us to believe, leading to my total memorization of the fantastic crashing animations).
Three levels, three control schemes. And it doesn’t stop there; the game experiments with blending the styles, for example making you dodge hazards while in the primarily shooting-oriented first-person cockpit view, or shoot said obstacles while in the hyper-responsive third-person flying view. There’s even a first-person shooter mode that looks a lot like Dark Forces, LucasArts’ first Star Wars FPS.
Even though the missions basically consist of little more than shooting and dodging, it rarely gets old because of the interesting way in which you’re doing it, and the engaging cutscenes between missions that keep your attention focused on the plot and characters.
That brings me to another notable aspect of the game: during a time when the idea of an “interactive movie” was all the rage, Rebel Assault II is one of the only games that has ever really delivered for me (another being The Daedalus Encounter). The cutscenes are very well-acted, and the compositing of the actors onto the 3D scenes is top-notch. The whole play-watch-play-watch dynamic doesn’t seem jarring at all, as the missions are pretty well integrated and integrated. The plot is pretty standard stuff: you’re a young hotshot rebel who goes on exciting space missions to foil the evil Empire. Pure Star Wars 13 year-old fantasy material, but it’s done well enough by the excellent acting and tight integration into the interactive action sequences.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a very dated game and everything. But the gameplay still feels very rich, and the graphics aren’t anything to scoff at, either. In particular, the absolutely hellish mission where you have to pilot the Millennium Falcon through a serpentine mining shaft and then abruptly change to operating the main guns when the stormtroopers start shooting doesn’t even remotely feel like it was made 15 years ago. A higher resolution (640×480 was considered high-res!), better lighting, and some slightly more detailed textures would make the sequence feel very modern, in fact.
Tell me that this doesn’t look pretty good by today’s standards:
It’s a pretty short game, but I’ve found it to be just boatloads of fun. If you ever played Rebel Assault II as a kid or have the least bit of nostalgia, you owe it to yourself to crack it open again and take another look!
Categorised as: Games, Reviews