Star Wars: Rebel Assault II

A cinematic Hollywood spectacle right on your TV set – that was how Star Wars: Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire was sold, one of LucasArts' most ambitious attempts to blend game and film. The sequel to the successful original bet everything on live-action video footage with real actors, set within both space and ground-based action scenes.

The gameplay rested on the principle of a rail shooter: the game led you along a predetermined path and your task was to shoot enemies, dodge obstacles and hit your targets in rhythm with the slick animated sequences. It was a style typical of the CD-ROM era, when the enormous capacity of discs allowed games to be filled with pre-rendered videos and live-action footage. The emphasis was clearly on the experience and the spectacle rather than on deep mechanics.

For its time it was a technologically impressive piece – full-color video, a combination of live-action and computer-generated scenes, and an effort to create the feeling that you were right in the middle of your own Star Wars adventure. The story of a secret Imperial project expanded the universe, and fans appreciated the atmosphere that radiated straight out of the films.

With hindsight, Rebel Assault II is a typical representative of the short but distinctive era of interactive movies, which quickly faded once real 3D graphics matured. Even so, it remains a valuable reminder of a time when creators tried to blur the line between game and film at any cost.

Today it will be appreciated mainly by nostalgics and collectors who want to taste what the ambitions of a mid-1990s multimedia experience looked like. As a piece of history it has its unquestionable place.

Why play it: A showcase interactive movie from the CD-ROM era with live-action video from the Star Wars world – a nostalgic stop in history, when games wanted to become film.