An evolution of the FMV shooter. It will never compare to the strangeness of one of the progenitors of the genre (seriously- who the heck thought no one would notice where that footage came from?).

The plot kinda sorta follows the first film mixed with the second film. You start out as a new rebel recruit training on Tatooine. You then fly through some asteroids, fight a Star Destroyer (Imperial-II model, because no one ever made an f***ing model kit for the Imperial-I!!!!), fight Imperial Walkers on what looks like but isn’t Hoth, and then you blow up the Death Star.

You are presented with several different types of gameplay. In some stages you control the ship from a 3rd person perspective from the rear and dodge stuff (and sometimes shoot). Other stages have you in a 3rd person overhead perspective of your ship where you shoot stuff under you. Other stages have you in the cockpit shooting whatever (and moving the ship based on how far to the side your targeting cursor is), while other stages have you controlling your character from a 3rd person perspective. Your control is limited though, you just aim the gun and fire.

I challenged myself to all three releases of the game last year. Let’s take a look at what I found.

PC

How the game’s supposed to be played… I think. My copy had some issues running- I have a laptop that runs Windows 98 (BTW- I learned over Christmas that you can make a festive background video for any occasion by modding Windows 98’s built-in 3D Maze screensaver with some images of your own), but even that was too advanced for Rebel Assault to function. There was no sound, and the controls were way off, but bear in mind I was also using a mouse rather than a controller or fighter stick. Plus, I recall some issues in setting controls for the mouse. (I know, I know, I should have used my most recent PC and just ran DOS-Box. Well, my modern laptop can’t read discs worth a darn).

But it certainly looked great! The graphics were pretty sharp and smooth. It’s like this was a DVD, compared to the 3DO’s glitchy first-generation laserdisc, compared to the Sega CD version which may have been filmed by Abraham Zapruder.

3DO

If you don’t have the right vintage PC, then this is how to play the game. So I’d say this is the most accessible version that won’t turn you off the game completely (I am assuming that as many people out there with Sega CD’s have a 3DO too). The controls work well, certainly better than what I was able to get out of the PC version. The sound is… not CD quality as we know it, or as any music fans at the time would know it, but it wasn’t terrible.

Sega CD

Ohhhhhh boy. So hard to compress the game onto the disc that amongst other things an entire stage was omitted.

The colors are marginally worse than the 3DO, as the Sega Genesis/CD combo can’t match the 32-bit powerhouse above. I had played a level or two in the past, but I came in this time thinking this version was much worse than it was as far as colors went, so that was a pleasant surprise.

 

What was very much unpleasant however was how the game controlled. In the 3rd Person Fighter Piloting levels, the magnetic force pulling your craft to the side was much stronger, and you had to hold up and right or up and left to break away, no matter where you were on the screen. If you just wanted to go left or right, forget it. Just to experiment I tried holding left, and my T-16 plunged to the right and into the canyon wall, and stayed there until it blew up.

One thing this game did better than the 3DO was that on the levels where you’re in the first person flying a ship, the cursor flowed nice and smooth. However auto-lock wasn’t a thing in this game, and you could be right on top of the enemy and blasting away and still miss every shot.

The top-down Death Star level was easier since I knew what to do, but there were some points of interest to it. The lasers seemed to stand motionless in the middle of the screen. My fighter randomly took damage when nothing should have caused it. As with the other top-down section in this game, and with the 3DO version, if you push down lightly on the button nothing happens, but as you add more pressure eventually your ship will suddenly jerk wildly in the direction you’re trying to go. That’s how the controls feel, it can come out kind of smooth on the screen.

The Sega-CD had another issue- it kept crashing. The disc was ok, but the system kept stopping the game. The video playback for the backgrounds and the background music would stop, but the lasers and their sound effects would function. The cursor could still be moved. This struck three times. Twice at the AT-AT stage, so intense the game could not continue. There was a third time at the AT-AT stage, but the game recovered.

The ground stages seemed to have a similar cursor handling to the 3DO version, but it felt and looked choppier.

The Verdict

Well… it’s good to have on the 3DO because it is a good game and the 3DO’s library is pretty poor. Avoid it on the Sega CD: there are better games to be had, and that’s the worst-done port. Only suitable for Completionists. The PC version is perfectly handsome but needs the right hardware. On the plus side- if you have the right hardware for this to run, chances are you can run some other classic Star Wars games, and other old games too (like the PC version of Mega Man X which I found to be quite fun).