Star Wars: Rebel Assault 2 - The Hidden Empire
IBM PC CD-ROM (œ29.95 - œ44.95) - Virgin Interactive Entertainment

                Reviewed by Richard Hewison

Rebel Assault was one of the first CD-ROM only games to be
released for the IBM PC. It was a mixture of sampled music and
effects from the first Star Wars movies coupled with lots of
rendered 'cut' scenes. Oh, and there were about 15 'Chapters'
where you played the game (although 'play' might be the wrong word
as the control system employed and the general game design was
pretty awful). Basically it was an arcade game with two or three
different game environments (in a ship or outside a ship mostly).

The Hidden Empire is the follow up. This time the game comes on
two CDs which is rapidly becoming the norm these days. The
reason? Well, for the first time in quite a while (since the Ewok
made-for-TV movies in the mid 1980s) new 'Star Wars' live action
footage was shot especially for this game. These cut scenes appear
at the start and the end of each 'chapter' or game. The quality of
this video footage is very good, although obviously you need a
minimum of a DX2 66 and a double-speed (or better) CD-ROM drive to
get the best out of it. You can also choose between three
different graphics modes - 320 x 200, 640 x 200 (laced) and 640 x
400. The latter looks the crispest but the video tends to be a
little out of sync with the sound on our DX2. To be honest it
looks fine in 320 x 200. Watching this footage is like viewing a
movie. All the ships have been rendered and created digitally
(which is how I imagine most if not all of the ships will be
created for the new Star Wars movie (Chapter One) in 1998/99) and
they look great. However, there are a few niggles. The standard of
acting in some of the scenes leaves an awful lot to be desired,
and when they filmed all of Darth Vader's scenes they forgot to
secure the neck section of his all-over helmet properly.
Consequently it moves all over the place when Vader moves his head
and it is so obvious it makes me wonder how they ever missed it
when they were filming!

The soundtrack is sampled directly from John William's scores for
the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back movies. The
sample rate sounds a little low (slightly muffled and a bit
crackly) but you get used to it after a few mins. The sound
effects are all authentic Star Wars samples as you might expect
from an official game.

Okay, enough of the presentation. What about the game? Well...it's
not that good actually. The first few games are essentially
re-hashes of the games found in the original Rebel Assault. In
Chapter One you aim and fire at TIE fighters as they scream
towards you (the ship follows a pre-determined flight path towards
a planet so you don't need to worry about flying the ship at all).
The second sees you pinned in a corner and picking off Imperial
storm troopers one by one. The third puts you in control of a
Corellian freighter and you have to steer it through some tight
tunnels from an outside (third person) view. The first two are
quite easy if you use a mouse. With a joystick it is a complete
nightmare and the games are rendered unplayable.  The third
chapter on the other hand is a complete waste of time regardless
of the chosen control method! (You can only have one control
method so if you wish to change for a chapter, you have to quit
out, make the change and then go back in again. Fortunately, once
a mission is finished once you don't have to do it all over again
unless you change your pilot). There are over a dozen chapters (or
levels) in total so I've only scratched the surface. Other levels
include flying X-Wings and Speeder Bikes.

There are lots of options available. You can completely edit the
difficulty of the game to the minutest detail with the difficulty
editor. You can adjust the brightness, volume, graphics resolution
etc. as well to suit your machine's capabilities. These settings
are then saved to your hard disk in a small configuration file.

I adore Star Wars and I've been a big fan of the other Lucasarts
games (X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Dark Forces) but for some reason the
"Rebel Assault" series has never really been favourites of mine. I
don't mind watching all the cut scenes and rendered space ships,
but (so far at least) the games themselves have been very
disappointing. Some people found X-Wing too hard to play. Others
will find "Rebel Assault" too simplistic. If only Lucasarts could
come up with something in-between the two!

As with a lot of games I've bought in the past year, patience
yields its own rewards. I waited until after Xmas to buy the game
and found it in our local Dixons store for under œ30 when the RRP
is œ44.95. The answer as always is to wait a while and shop
around.













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