Meet Star Wars First Assault - The Hidden Star Wars Game You Never Knew Existed

If the name Star Wars First Assault means nothing to you and you've never heard of it, don't feel bad. I was in exactly the same situation until a random browse through Reddit introduced me to a gameplay video from a Star Wars game I'd never heard of: Star Wars First Assault. From there, I was pulled deep into the rabbit hole, and after a few hours down there, I'm ready to tell you the story of Star Wars First Assault, the hidden Star Wars game you probably never heard about.

First Assault is an FPS game developed around 2011 that focused on battles between Rebel soldiers and the Empire, with gameplay reminiscent of the arena shooters of the early 2000s. The main difference between First Assault and the Battlefront game series was the absence of Jedi, as it essentially presented the battles of the "little soldiers" in the greater Star Wars world. The game was developed by LucasArts as a sort of tools experiment that tested some of the mechanics and their new game engine. Development of First Assault was at a relatively advanced stage of maturity, with a beta version ready for player testing before an expected launch in the summer of 2013.

So far everything sounds good and positive, but the story of First Assault starts to go downhill after Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012. Shortly after the acquisition, Disney decided to shut down LucasArts' development division and transfer the game development license to EA, which led to the modern Battlefront games, the pair of Jedi games, and more. Following the studio's closure, First Assault was also canceled along with additional projects like Star Wars 1313 and a project called Version 2 that was suspected to be Battlefront III. So how is it that I managed to record gameplay 14 years after the game's cancellation? Recently, a community of modders managed to get their hands on the game's beta files and make it accessible using an emulator that allows it to run on PC. This version is obviously very bare-bones and only contains the planet Tatooine and requires using a game controller, but it's enough to see what we missed and experience a bit of the magic of this special game. If you also want to try Star Wars First Assault, I recommend joining the Discord server that explains how to do it.