The best space battles in the Star Wars universe have finally arrived. Everything else is another story.

User Rating: 7.9 | Star Wars: Empire at War PC
Even though I’m pretty sure I’ve killed Darth Vader at least a thousand times and I’m almost positive the Death Star can’t be rebuilt like a set of LEGOs anymore, everything seems to reset itself nicely year in and year out thanks to Star Wars games. LucasArts, in one more attempt at truly covering the genre spread, presents “Star Wars: Empire at War,” the publisher’s latest attempt since “Star Wars: Rebellion” (and developer Petroglyph’s first) at making the ultimate galactic management RTS with space and land battles. The end result consists of one of the most poorly written and rushed single player campaigns of any LucasArts title and a space battle system that is both mind-blowing and repetitive at the same time. If LucasArts hadn’t embedded in every fanboy’s brain that this stuff never gets old, “SW: EAW” would be no more than another RTS.

Yet somehow it escapes such a dire fate; it somehow makes the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs (yes, the Star Wars references are only beginning). It takes the manual from “SW: Rebellion” that was the length of the 9/11 report and turns the galaxy into an actually manageable world. Planets finally serve the purpose that RTS games are always hinting at in the first place: war! You build ground troops and space fleets; you buy barracks and space stations; and as always, you mine for resources until there’s nowhere left to mine. With an entirely war driven galactic management system, you might expect the single player campaign’s story to be an experience all its own to cover up the endless war. After all, it can’t all just be war raging nonsense can it? Psst…it’s called “Star Wars: Empire at War.” Apparently it is.

Both the Empire and Rebel Scum campaigns try to delve into the lesser-known characters from “A New Hope” and what they were up to when the Death Star was making its claim to fame. This idea worked well in novels, but when it comes to keeping a gamer awake for 15 hours, only throwing roughly 25 minutes of aged George Lucas-like storytelling into the campaigns is highly unattractive. Every mission’s objective is to either “destroy this” or “escort this” (which translates into destroying everything to make way for the escort). Usually these objectives turn into a lot of sitting around and waiting for a building or a space station to blow up. The story feels like it should have remained “unheard of.”

Lucasarts and Petroglyph even downplayed the classic “Death Star blow up level” with an anticlimactic battle that is like any other space battle in the game. The final 15-second cut-scenes for each campaign prove the fact that neither Lucasarts nor Petroglyph had any intention of making the campaign worth playing at all. But like C-3PO realized when he first walked into a gay droid bar, there’s always something out there worth playing around with. Surprisingly enough, the same goes for Star Wars games.

In a bright and bubbly revelation, every gamer who touches “SW: EAW” comes to realize that it’s the battle system that makes the game mentionable. It’s easy for a game with the title “Star Wars” to be forgotten quickly these days; it’s all a matter of what key feature the latest title will bring that decides if it will be well-known or not. Land battles are, for the most part, quite bland due to repetitive and wide-open scenery fused with sub-par AI. Don’t get me wrong, the scenery is certainly beautiful, but it’s also spread about the entire map without any other variety.

Some of the vehicles have been enhanced quite a bit graphically since the “Galactic Battlegrounds” days, but there are no significant gameplay improvements. It’s great seeing the AT-AT stomp around and even drop stormtroopers from its belly, but the monstrosity moves so slowly it’s almost impossible to control (don’t even think about turning it around). There’s a nice feature that lets you have bombing raids if you have a fleet stationed above the planet. Features like that can go a long way to making both the galactic management and battle systems feel like one strategic game. There’s unfortunately not quite enough of that to make the two feel balanced.

Little mistakes can also go a long way as well; for example, when you are defending a planet you can’t build land forces from your barracks and factories once you enter battle. This not only disconnects the game’s two layers (management and RTS), but is also unrealistic and rarely seen in the RTS genre anymore. Finding bad AI, on the other hand, seems to be quite common in movie-based RTS games. Although playing online with real people fixes this usually, getting through the campaigns can get frustrating when it comes to managing several ground troops that always need your direction. Overall, the ground battles feel like a sloppy version of “Galactic Battlegrounds” and serve only as more gameplay time to backup the game’s true shining glory: the space battles.

No screenshot, no gameplay video and no prior experience prepared me enough for “SW: Empire at War’s” magnificent space battles. They are tactical, strategic, graphically mesmerizing and as cinematic as it gets. The game’s strategic balance for both sides is very well done; the Rebels come equipped with fast ships like the x-wings or the corellian corvettes while the Empire comes with the massive star destroyers that can barely turn, but deal loads of damage when they do strike. If you look even closer, each ship has its own time limited special ability such as turning off shields for maximum firepower or maximum speed.

But if you choose to look even closer, you may drool too much. Each large ship, such as the frigates or star destroyers, has specific points on its hull that can be targeted (this also applies to enormous space stations that hover above planets). In other words, in order to take down a star destroyer, you’re going to want your x-wings to get in there and take out its engines or shield generator before you bring in the frigates. After those go down, you might target the destroyer’s hangar bay and stop those tie fighters from flowing out. There are usually a dozen different points to target on a large ship and sometimes twice that number on the space stations. Surprisingly, the AI knows to follow this strategy on its own a lot of the time, leaving more time for you to sit back and enjoy.

Each space map looks beautiful and comes filled with dozens of asteroid fields and nebulas that can be used strategically for sneak attacks and tactical maneuvers. Off in the background, you can always see the planet that you are fighting above spinning and, in a sense, showing off its beautiful modeling. The game also includes a cinematic mode that lets you sit back and watch the action with a cinematic camera at any time during a battle. Zooming in on a star destroyer or a space station as it explodes into hundreds of actual pixilated pieces is quite possibly as good as a Star Wars experience can get. Best of all, you won’t need more than a 128 MB video card to get the full effect with the space battles (much worse on ground battles due to more units and a much wider area).

There’s really no reason to mention anything regarding the sound simply because you know it will be perfect; they can steal every sound bite they want from the films and call it “authentic.” What makes the game worthy of a sound paragraph, however, is the most repeated line in the game. I have no idea what type of ship reports it over and over again, but it is the most disturbing sound of death that I’ve ever heard in a game. “Sir…Sir, I’ve…AYEEEUUUGHH!!!!!…Sir, sir I’ve got a….AEEEUGHHHHH!!!” Thank you, LucasArts for this authentic moment.

Roll all of the layers of gameplay together, throw it online and you’ve got endless hours to waste on another RTS. It’s pretty easy for it all to get old when playing online, whether you’re playing a simple skirmish or an all-out galactic management war trying to control every planet in the galaxy. The more you realize that the galaxy is just a bunch of planets used to fuel your army and nothing else, the more repetitive and meaningless it all becomes. The galaxy map can serve as a fun chess game to accompany the many battles, but it could also use a lot more depth to keep you hooked. Nevertheless, if waging war for hours on end in some highly repetitive scenarios is your kind of corellian ale, then don’t waste a second in picking up “SW: EAW.”

On the other hand, sitting back and truly analyzing the game can show that it has the same flaws that any RTS does. Essentially all that “SW: EAW” offers is a space battle system that can probably last two months at best. Hardcore Star Wars fans and hardcore RTS fans will certainly be overjoyed by the spirited and strong gameplay mechanics that the team at Petroglyph, whose programmers have worked on the best RTS titles ever made, have put together. But don’t fall for the fanboy syndrome here; just because the box says “Fight at Endor and Hoth!” doesn’t mean the greatest RTS battles lie ahead. It seems as though covering an entire galaxy is just too much work for a game that really just wants to capture the essence of RTS space battles.

If you’re looking for a game with Civilization-like management and Command and Conquer worthy ground battles in a Star Wars universe, then keep waiting. I guarantee you the Death Star is dying to explode again and Leia can’t wait to put her slave dress on a dozen more times before LucasArts calls it quits. If you’ve waited a decade since “SW: Rebellion” for epic space battles, stop daydreaming about what Yoda might look like naked and buy it. At some point, however, LucasArts had best balance the scope of their games with the amount of time and money they put into them.