Star Wars: Rebel Assault is an arcade flight/shooting game based on the original Star Wars trilogy. Players control Rebel recruit Rookie One (who can be set to have either a male or female voice) in combat against the Empire. Story events (which don’t follow the films to the letter but instead offer their own interpretation and characters) include Rookie One’s basic training, an Imperial assault on Tatooine, the battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back and the Death Star battle from A New Hope. Players will control four different Star Wars craft: Skyhoppers, A-Wings, X-Wings, and Snowspeeders.
The game’s fifteen levels encompass navigating canyons, caves, and asteroid fields, battles against TIE Fighters in space, attacks against a Star Destroyer and an Imperial Walker, a battle on foot against stormtroopers, and the famous Death Star trench run. There are three different types of flight sequences: seen from either behind the own craft, from an overhead perspective, or from a first-person cockpit view. All follow an ‘on-rails’ model, utilizing motion video backdrops displaying pre-rendered environments. The third-person levels allow some degree of free movement to dodge obstacles, while the first-person levels limit movement to a minimum, mostly requiring accurate shooting instead. Some levels offer a choice of branching paths. The on-foot level takes place on static screens, with Rookie One seen from behind, stormtroopers moving in from side corridors, and the player being able to take steps to the side to avoid enemy fire. The game features a password system – a password is given after every level in the console ports, but only after a group of levels in the PC version.
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