Most start up screens are just flashy animated logos and deserve no more attention than is necessary to push a button and make them stop. But Rebel Strike has a charming opening worth watching. It'd be a great screensaver for any Star Wars geek.

And the Rogue Squadron series is nothing if not Thanksgiving Dinner for the Star Wars fan. The menus have clips from the original trilogy in the background, copious use of the original score (with some newer music, too) and the picture-perfect reproductions of X-Wings, Tie Fighters and supporting vehicular cast. All of it is spot-on and as faithful a rendition of Star Wars as any use of the license in any entertainment medium.

The story begins just after the Battle of Yavin, which was at the end of the first Star Wars movie. The basics of Rebel Strike are the same as Rogue Leader. The training mode is familiar, though it now includes third-person training, on foot, and missions originate from a briefing room that allows you to replay any previous mission at any time in hopes of attaining a higher medal. Your performance in each mission is judged based on several criteria like hit ratio, number of enemies downed, lives lost and mission time. Earning medals from Bronze to Gold gives you points to unlock more missions and extra.

Learning the nuances of each craft is a must, as right from the beginning you'll be tasked with things like disabling transports using an ion cannon or using a lightning quick A-Wing to navigate dangerous spaces. There are also opportunities to drop bombs, disable ground units and take on ships much, much larger than yours.

But most of your time is spent dog fighting other fighters — this is a space combat game, after all. Once the thrill of flying an X-Wing wears off, and it takes a while for some of us, you'll realize that most of the Tie pilots in Rebel Strike spend their time doing their best to avoid you. Generally speaking, they'll take shots at you when you aren't paying attention because you're after some other target or on the rare occasion when you happen to fly directly at one another.

The rest of your kills will occur when you see them flying in formation at some distance and they act like you aren't even there. They aren't just vulnerable because they don't react to you, but it's at these middle distances that it's more likely you'll be able to match speed with them and get a decent shot. In one mission, the last remaining Tie avoids you like the plague. It's as if the pilot knows you're playing a game and instead of retreating or fighting back, he just hides at the outermost reaches of your radar, making it annoyingly difficult to finish the level.

Most of the time, the flight combat is entertaining and challenging. Particularly when you're thrown into a scene from one of the movies, but aren't force to complete them the way you saw them done the first time. On the Hoth level, for example, you can tie up the AT-ATs with your speeder's tow cable, but you don't have to. It's a great example of how a game can interact with a movie without changing it too much or forcing the player into a predetermined course of action.

Different views are available to offer different perspectives, but aren't realistic choices for playing the game. Cockpit view looks nice, surrounding the edges of your screen with the ship's interior and placing you realistically on the side of the craft in some cases, as you would be in a car. But the lack of viewable area out the ship's window makes playing the game inordinately difficult. If you want an even worse view, turn on your targeting computer. It's the same as cockpit mode but with an orange screen obscuring the scene even more (it looks like the targeting computer used in the attack on the Death Star in the first movie). The computer helps you distinguish between friendlies and targets, but the trade off is far from worth it.

For the most part, Rebel Strike feels very similar to Rogue Leader. The biggest change in this new game is the addition of vehicle and on-foot missions. The vehicle missions, which include speeder bikes (seen in Return of the Jedi), AT-ST and AT-AT walkers and land speeders. They're unique and entertaining for what they are — a change of pace and perspective. They're relatively short and easy, too. But the missions using Luke and Wedge on foot go well beyond that goal. They're too long to be considered a change of pace and too pointless and frustratingly shallow to be written off and put behind you.

The controls are a lot like other third person combat games, except they've been stripped down to the bare basics. Move, shoot, crouch, jump, roll and throw grenade. There's also a target lock system, but you're better served by just running in the direction of your target as opposed to waiting for the auto lock to catch up with who it should target next. One early mission has you escorting a droid through a canyon infested with hordes of storm troopers and battle droids. Others make you take down larger craft with turrets while other enemies pour out of nowhere. These missions aren't exactly hard, but I found myself replaying them because it's difficult to try when you're as annoyed as I was. I want to be flying through space or at least driving a walker, not avoiding blaster fire with a poorly animated, clunky moving land-bound pilot.

All of that would be tolerable if these were short missions that didn't affect your overall mission score, but that's not the case. They aren't all necessary to finish, but most of them are. And replaying them because you didn't quite get enough droids or, more often, because it took you too long to complete them without dying isn't satisfying on any level. These are not just missions without value, that are not fun. They're also aggravating chores that take away from the experience as a whole.

During gameplay, the graphics are definitely an improvement over the last game. Everything is sharper and the colors richer than before, which is saying a lot. The cinematic cut scenes, however, seem patched together from several small scenes. The result is a brief but jarring load time between almost every change in camera angle. Each cut scene has several skips within it, which never allows you to concentrate on what's being said or shown on screen.

There are too many little things wrong with the strongest part of the game, the flight combat, to completely excuse the weakest parts, the third person missions on foot. In many ways, Rebel Strike feels identical to Rogue Leader. There are successful sequels that do nothing but build incrementally on the foundation of the original and end up being very good games. Jedi Academy is a perfect example. But instead of focusing on what made Rogue Leader so good and improving and expanding upon it, Rebel Strike left the good parts alone and added poorly conceived, ill-fitting foot missions that almost suck the fun out of the game. Even so, the core of the game is candy for Star Wars fans.