'90s Star Wars games were the best Star Wars games—except for The Phantom Menace tie-in—and the above remake of Rogue Squadron's The Jade Moon level in Unreal Engine 4 really underlines that. It's a very clean-looking fan effort that captures the art style of the original game while enhancing it with much nicer effects, models and textures.
The video was posted by Thanaclara last month, and is now doing the rounds on Reddit via user 1Whiskeyplz. It clearly uses audio from the original game, which enhances its authenticity, plus it has a functioning minimap. I would play the shit out of this.
This isn't the first time footage of the project has done the rounds. Last April, the following video of the excellent Defection at Corellia level—well, excellent except for trying to take down AT-ATs, which was a real pain in the arse in Rogue Squadron—was also circulated, minus some textures. See that below:
Around this time, DSO Gaming interviewed Thanaclara. The aim is for the remake to include every level and ship from the game, and as of April 2018, the project had been going for two years, with another two planned. "It’s been in development for a couple years so far but we’re confident we can get everything that was in the original game finished in a reasonable amount of time. Certainly less than a couple more years I would hope." It's worth reading the full interview for Thanaclara's thoughts on distributing the game—and getting around copyright infringement.
There's a Subreddit for the project if you're interested in learning more about how development is going. If nothing else, hopefully this encourages LucasArts to find a way to get the GameCube Rogue Squadron games onto PC, which looked amazing at the time.
