Star Wars: Rebel Assault

Rebel Assault was the first CD ROM-only game published by Lucasarts, set in the Star Wars universe.

Although the scenario, the plot and the variety of missions were neither original or rich, the game's value consisted mainly on the technical part, since it featured digitised footage and music from the original movies, full speech and high quality 3d rendered gaphics. The 'levels' of the game were to remind events and battles of the movies.

In fact the game hinted mainly on impression recreating famous scenes of the movies, rather than being accurate to the Star Wars storyline: it follows the events of Star Wars: A New Hope, but erroneously it has elements from the Battle of Hoth.

The gameplay consists of various spaceflight missions, mainly confined in a certain video looping. The course of the ship is predetermined and the player has to hit the targets (usually TIE fighters) that show up and partially control and steer the ship so that it won't collide to some obstacles and lose hit points.

In some cases, original footage was filmed for the game with actors, and in a case, a Star Destroyer model was digitised (a mini camera 'flew' around it) for the needs of a certain mission. Most of the graphics were rendered in 3D.

Story
The game follows the adventures of a young person known as Rookie One. Like Luke Skywalker, it is a farmboy or farmgirl from Tatooine (the player can choose the gender) and decides to join the Rebel Alliance. The whole game happens during the events of Star Wars: A New Hope and begins with his/her training, some hours before the Devastator captures Tantive IV above Tatooine.

Rookie then joins a squadron to intercept the Devastator and after the mission is over they descend back to the planet in order to stop an Imperial assault on Tatooine.

The story then leads the player on Hoth, where Rookie will have to stop the AT-AT walkers on a Snowspeeder and then escape the base firing his/her way through the Stormtroopers in a sequence that reminds of the Battle of Hoth (which is a blooper since this didn't happen before the Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back).

The Alliance eventually learns about the Death Star project and the player guides Rookie to the Battle of Yavin. The final missions follow the actions of the Blue Squadron, simultaneously to the Red Squadron shown in the movie. They take place near and on the Death Star where the player has to destroy turrets, stop a gigantic laser gun (that was absent from the movie) and finally destroy it in place of Luke Skywalker.

The game was followed by Star Wars: Rebel Assault II - The Hidden Empire.