In this game, you play Skywalker who leads a Rebel squadron of fighters on missions to various planets. Blow up your first ship and you are left with two. Lose them, and you have to restart the mission from scratch. Some mission briefings tend to be a bit vague, so you may have to go on a number of failed missions before the objectives become clearer. Missions are grouped into chapters and some missions allow you to try out different ships, but only after you have completed the whole chapter using default ships.
All ships have blaster cannons as primary weapons but each also carry a different secondary weapon.
Secondary weapons consist of bombs or missiles, but the Airspeeder has a tow cable which I had to fiddle around for a quite a while before I could use it effectively, especially with scant documentation. You can also choose to fly using the cockpit viewpoint so common in normal flight simulators. Unlike pure flight simulators like the X-Wing and the Tie Fighter games published also by Lucas Arts, missions in Rogue Sqadron are set on planet surfaces. The controls are also less complex and a few laws of physics are bent. The enemy Tie fighters and bombers are quite slow, making them easy targets, but the quicker Tie interceptors are trickier.