3/5 ★ – Lammy's review of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II - Rogue Leader.

Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader post-completion review - This is a game I really struggled with as a young kid, so revisiting it felt nice. Rogue Squadron II is one of the Gamecube's launch titles, an arcade-style flight simulator taking place during and surrounding the Star Wars Original Trilogy. You play as either Luke Skywalker or Wedge Antilles, the various commanders of the infamous Rogue Squadron, as you take on the Imperials in missions ranging from iconic movie setpieces like the Battle of Yavin or the attack on the Second Death Star above Endor to game original stages filling in some of the gaps in these pivotal scenes. The story has you pilot classic craft like the X-Wing or Millennium Falcon, but performing well enough to get Gold Medals in each mission can unlock extra ships like the Naboo Starfighter or Slave 1 (or you could enter a cheat code, remember those?). The controls are... iffy at times, and I often felt that I moved too wildly for the amount of pressure I put on my Gamecube controller's analog stick, but once you figure it out the game makes an excellent flight sim... until the final mission. "Strike at the Core" is an awful, mind numbingly difficult escort mission that I cannot believe I've beaten. You have to cover the Millennium Falcon on approach to the core of the Death Star II, but if you play suboptimally for literally three seconds it's game over. Every other mission can be beaten with skill and familiarity, but I swear I cleared this out of LUCK. This ridiculous ending is honestly a major reason why the game's rating is what it is. Overall, I do enjoy this game, but mostly out of nostalgia for a time in my life where things made a little more sense and Star Wars could be anything anyone wanted it to be, before most of the prequels or most of the novels or any of the Disney came in and everyone suddenly decided it was never good, actually. It's a simple title, from a simpler age... but it's also not a great one. 6/10