A Star Wars game that's true to the original trilogy AND fun to play? The mind boggles at the concept.
Fortunately, Star Wars: Empire At War has absolutely nothing to do with those 3. Chronologically, the game is set right after the close of the oh-so-melodramatic episode 3 and you play on through to the end of A New Hope (usually known as just Star Wars or "the first one"). For those of you overly familiar with the franchise (One of us! One of us! One of us!), that should give you a pretty good idea of what units you get and how the Campaign mode plays out. For everyone else, a quick precis:
In the blue corner, you've got a massive, galaxy spanning Empire with virtually unlimited resources and incredibly advanced technology.
In the red corner, you have a tiny rebellion made up of dissidents and a few outlying planets that managed to avoid getting smashed by the Empire when the republic was dissolved.
Empire at War follows this pretty closely. If you play as the republic, you're at a HUGE disadvantage militarily (at least initially). If you try to fight the Empire on its own terms, you WILL lose, and you will lose very, very badly. Here's an example: As the Rebellion, you have to manufacture each individual squadron of X-Wings and Y-Wings for your space battles. If they're lost in combat, they're gone. As the Empire, if you build a Star Destroyer (or Acclimator, etc.) it will automatically spawn TIE Fighters and TIE Bombers from its hanger. If they're destroyed, more will just keep spawning from the hanger, even during combat.
So the Rebellion is screwed all the time, right? No, because they cheat. As the Rebellion you can take a small force (3 units*) and land them directly on the surface of a planet, completely bypassing the Empire fleet surrounding it. If you destroy all of the Empire structures and forces holding the planet (and if you fail once, that doesn't mean you can't keep sending raids until you succeed), you gain control and all the Star Destroyers in the galaxy can't do anything about it.
So, with all that talk of combat this and combat that, how does the game actually play? On the surface level, a lot like a real-time version of Master of Orion. You conquer planets and attempt to control the galaxy. The more planets you hold, the more money you make and the more units you can control at one time. You can also build structures on and in orbit around these planets that add defensive capabilities, give bonuses of one sort or another and allow you to build different units. Almost every planet you conquer will also give you an additional bonus, like reduced cost on a specific unit, reduced build time, etc. Again, if you're VERY familiar with the Star Wars mythos, you can actually predict some of these (e.g. Kuat is the home of the Imperial shipyards, so it's going to be one of the planets you can build the massive Star Destroyer on).
Empire at War expands on this concept by adding what they call "Tactical Combat". Every time 2 opposing armies meet, you're shifted from the galactic view to a isometric/3rd person view of the specific combat arena. To anyone who played a lot of Starcraft/Warcraft, this will all look pretty familiar. The big shift from those games is in the "Tactical" part. Each map has a limited number of units you can have active at one time. Any extra units are held in reserve, and can be called in as re-enforcements if one of the active units is destroyed. In space battles, this basically means that if some of your units are destroyed and you have reserves, you can call them in and keep fighting. On the planet's surface it's a much, much bigger deal. As an attacker, you'll usually start the battle only able to bring in 2-3 units against the defender's max of 10. You have to move quickly and capture more re-enforcement points (similar to Flags in Battlefield 1942, etc.) in order to bring in a larger force. If the defender captures your last re-enforcement point and kills all your infantry (only infantry can capture/hold re-enforcement points), you're toast.
While all of that seems pretty straightforward, don't get too comfortable. There's yet another twist. Each unit you bring into battle has specific units that it is strong against, and specific units it is weak against. And we REALLY mean strong and weak. If you take that AT-ST (the walker things from Return of the Jedi) up against a Rebellion rocket infantry squad, better say goodbye to it pretty quick. Want to pit your Star Destroyer against those teeny tiny Y-Wings? Fine, where should we send your ashes? Basically, it breaks down to a complex game of paper-rock-scissors. If you and your opponent have pretty equal forces, but he's got all 3 and you only have 2, better start clicking retreat and hope he doesn't have any Interdictors**.
Wait! There's more! What would Star Wars be without the main characters? Empire At War's got them too. This is the one part of the game where the balance just goes out the window. Think about the chronology for a sec, and it should be pretty obvious what I'm talking about.
Got it yet?
That's right. Almost all of the Jedi are DEAD, but the Empire's still got Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine. You can praise the values of R2-D2, C-3PO, Mon Motha, Han Solo, General Ackbar, and Captain Antilles all you want, but they don't last long up against the Sith. The Empire's heroes, especially the Emperor, kick the crap out of anything they come across. This is doubly true in the campaign mode, where (for some reason) you don't get access to Obi-wan Kenobi at all, and you're stuck with the extremely lackluster Mon Motha and Antilles for most of the game.
You can tell that the dev team and everyone involved actually LIKES Star Wars and is (and this is the amazing part) really, REALLY familiar with the details and nuances of the series. Everything in the game feels very authentic (I'm a little disappointed in how they handled the Death Star, but it's not a big enough issue to take the shine of the rest off the game). The biggest problem really arose after I finished the campaign mode. After 20 or so hours of playing both sides and judging their strengths fairly objectively, there's really only one possible conclusion:
The Empire should've stomped the Rebel Alliance into red rebel-y paste.
Fortunately, the Galactic Conquest mode is much more balanced. The Empire starts out with an edge in strength and finances, but once the Rebellion gets momentum and gets their highest level units, they're very hard to stop. Rebel artillery combined with Speeders are a monster combo on land, and Mon Calamari cruisers are devastating in space. Why are you still reading this? You get to do all the cool stuff you wish you could've done with those toys you had as a kid. Go buy the game already.
Oh, and I guess I should mention that the graphics and audio in the game are great and completely true to the original trilogy (that's 4-6, not 1-3 for those counting). There's also this feature called "Cinecam"(or something like) that lets you view all of the battles in a cinematic-ish way, which was nifty, I guess. To be honest, I really only used it once or twice. I micromanage when I play RTS games, and you can't control the units from that perspective, so I really didn't get much use out of it, but it's there if you want it.
There is multiplayer for those who want it, but I can't say I was overly impressed. The skirmish mode just ends up playing a LOT like Starcraft/Warcraft, but isn't as much fun, and the Galactic Conquest multiplayer simply takes too long.
*The word "unit is misleading in Empire at War. A single "unit" of tanks in the game is actually 5 individual tanks. Conversely, A Star Destroyer actually counts for several units (I think 5? I'm too lazy to check).
**Interdictor def. - A variant of the Imperial Star Destroyer that generates a gravity well and prevents ships in its vicinity from entering Hyperspace.