For a game about fighter jets, Rebel Raiders doesn't give you much freedom. There's an oddly low artificial ceiling to the environments that keeps you from getting very far from the ground. As a result, you'll often find yourself in danger of colliding with the side of a mountain. Not to worry, though. This results only in you thudding off of the landscape in a cloud of dust, losing just a few points off of your shield. It's almost comical. And even when you're going full throttle, the action feels quite slow. Rather than delivering a sense of pulse-pounding combat at hundreds of miles per hour, there's an almost lackadaisical feeling to bringing your plane looping around to target and destroy yet another enemy fighter.
At least the water looks nice.
The campaign can easily be completed in about five hours or so, and that's including a nasty trick that the game pulls to artificially extend its duration. At times, you'll need to complete a special challenge mission to unlock the next story mission. Challenges have you replaying missions that you've already completed, but with special requirements tacked on, such as time limits or certain weapons being unavailable. The missions aren't much fun to complete the first time around, so this requirement to complete some of them a second time feels cheap.
Unsurprisingly, Rebel Raiders looks a few years old. There are a few eye-catching aspects to the presentation, such as the deep blues of the ocean and the rich purples of the sky at dusk, but the terrain is pretty featureless, the planes are unimpressive, and capital ships have a boxy, uninspired design. However, the action does keep moving at a steady clip, even when the screen is filled with aircraft. The sound is as unremarkable as the graphics. The music and sound effects are generic, and the voice chatter between Ghost Leader and his squadmates is totally scripted, repeating identically each time you play a level, so it doesn't lend any sense of life or spontaneity to the action.
Rebel Raiders is a barebones package with no multiplayer or anything else to lend it any lasting value. There are a decent number of unlockable planes, but they're all minor variations on four basic types and have no significant impact on the gameplay. If you're looking for some air combat on the Wii, you'll be better served by picking up one of the marginally superior games in the genre. This one should have stayed in 2006.
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