Star Wars : Rebel Assault Video Game For Sega CD Review

Star Wars : Rebel Assault is an on the rails video game published by LucasArts in 1993. The game was originally available for the Sega CD, DOS, Apple Macintosh and the 3DO.



You are Rookie One, a new pilot for the Rebellion and they need your help to fight the Empire. This game takes place during A New Hope and basically replaces Luke Skywalker with your character. For some reason during the middle of the game you go to Hoth and fight the AT-ATs from The Empire Strikes Back. Once you complete the Hoth levels you have a couple made up levels for the game and you end up at the Death Star from A New Hope.

The game consists of 15 different levels but for some reason, possibly space??, the Sega CD version is missing Chapter 7 (Imperial Probe Droids). There are a few different game play styles in this game.

The first is the behind the ship view. Your ship flies forward on the rails and you move it left, right, up and down to avoid obstacles. These levels would be OK but the controls are pretty bad.

The next play style is above your ship. Again your ship moves on rails and you can move it back and forth left and right to avoid obstacles. Like the behind the view levels these don't handle the greatest either making them harder than they should be.

There are also cockpit view levels. These aren't as bad as the above mentioned levels. They are on rails like the other ones but you just need to worry about shooting ships and that's it. These levels controls work pretty well, probably the best in this game.

The last kind of levels are the third person on the ground. Your character, Rookie One, is on his feet fighting stormtroopers. You pick where he goes when a choice comes up, basically left or right, and you get to shoot at stormtroopers as they come at you. I liked the variety that these levels provide and it's nice to be doing something outside of a ship but these levels do not control very well at all. These are my least favorite levels in this game.

The game contains cuts scenes between the levels to help tell the story. At the time this game came out the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were the big systems at that time. And while those consoles couldn't actually do cut scenes like we have now but what they had at the time were great. I remember when Super Star Wars came out for the SNES, even thought they game only had the still picture for the cut scenes with text for dialogue it was awesome looking. But then when this game came out the cut scenes blew those of Super Star Wars and any others games from those consoles. It's true, especially on the Sega CD, that they aren't that good today with them being grainy and color faded but they were wonderful then. They were actual videos with real music, sound effects and voices.

Super Star Wars on SNES still cut scene with text.

Rebel Assault on Sega CD video cut scene from A New Hope.

Rebel Assault combined both clips from the movies for the cuts scenes and new scenes made up for the game. It really helped draw you into the game. The only strange thing was that the music would sometimes end before the cut scene ended. I remember one in particular where Darth Vader is talking to a subordinate and the music just ends in between the dialogue. It always stuck out to me and I don't know the reason for it.

Friends don't let friends drink and fly!

Rebel Assault's music and sound effects are great. You get the same music from right out of the movies so there is nothing to complain about. It's the same for the sound effects, straight out of A New Hope.

There are a few levels that have you doing flybys of a star destroyer, AT-ATs and the Death Star. As you go around you need to fire at these different colored panels as they go by. It can be very frustrating to do because even if you have the aiming reticule lined up it just doesn't work. If you go by too many times and don't destroy enough you die and need to try again.

You can see the orange panels on the AT-AT.

The game has a few different difficulty choices and a few lives to use. Once the lives are used up it's game over but after beating each level you get a pass code to use so it makes it pretty easy to beat the game. If it's too hard for you just go on the Internet and look up the code and you can play any level at any difficulty, if you're a cheater!

Trench Run, Use The Force.

Would I recommend this game to you today? That's a hard question. The controls for this game nearly cripple it. You can play it, enjoy it and beat the game as long as you understand about the controls. If you played this game when it was new you may find yourself having fun playing it again. If you never played it before you may want to stay away from this one unless you want to play all the Star Wars games. This game kind of highlights the problem with the Sega CD, the developers worried too much about how the game looks instead of how it plays. Super Star Wars for the SNES with its inferior graphics and sounds is much easier to play today than Rebel Assault. I would have to give Star Wars Rebel Assault for the Sega CD a 5 out of 10.