Star Wars Empire at War is excellent fan service, an innovative RTS title that takes a lot of what's to love from board games, moves it onto the PC screen, and offers you a better way to "be a part of the battles you love" than any other Star Wars game does. But it also has some pacing issues and loses a few points for rookie RTS mistakes. Star Wars fans, hang in there for a minute. We're going to talk about things like Mon Calamari cruiser capabilities and Red Squadron in a minute. For now, we're going to look at what really works for EAW as an RTS and what nicks it down from being surreally good to "just" amazing. The campaign mode covers the uncontroversial period that takes place from a bit after Episode III's end to just after the end of Episode IV, while the Galactic Conquest mode is composed of choice snippets of that era. Campaign mode moves at a sort of jerky pace, and at the endgame, quite suddenly, the Death Star bears down on planets, Luke makes an appearance, and everything moves too quickly to really enjoy. It's climactic, yes, but the abruptness cuts short your time to enjoy finally accessing your ultimate technologies. The maps included for the Galactic Conquest mode are well realized, giving you more chances to pick the heroes you want to play with, the level of tech you feel like starting with, and the general scale of conflict you want to command. Skirmish mode, with its centralized production and cool maps, still doesn't feel like a traditional RTS -- the Galactic Map may not be there, but you can practically feel its presence looming over you. When you need more resources, you take a planet or you set up a smuggling operation in an enemy's territory. You don't send out miners like some feudal crackpot -- you send a fleet and an army! This Empire is at war, son! Just complicated enough to keep you moving at stress speeds, the Galactic Map is a great piece of Risk-style strategic warfare made real time, forcing you to move units to the right place at the right time and sometimes just pray that you gambled their lives correctly. More important, it makes the combat maps all about combat, not about you micromanaging as a construction contractor-cum-landlord. Victory requires using the right units at the right time -- a high-difficulty A.I. opponent might not be smart enough to press every advantage on the Galactic Map, but it will definitely punish you for stupid unit matchup choices in combat. Sometimes you will actually find yourself hyperspacing out of a fight you can't win to regroup and check your intel before launching back in. Planets never exhaust their resources, so if you control even a single planet, you can fall back, rebuild, and continue the good (or evil) fight. And while EAW feels properly epic at the galactic level, it feels properly down and dirty at the combat level. Hero units are, like their base units, larger than life, crushing armies of lesser beings under their boot, armored footpad, or head-mounted laser. But there's no excuse for having to hunt down every unit and structure on a map to win. The unit balancing on the ground lacks the depth that having an "air" plane of combat would introduce, and all combat lacks upgrades for resources or experience, which could have given more strategy to your choice of units (and upgrades). Combat can instead come down to whether you twitch one second faster and wipe out your enemies' counterunits before they wipe out yours, and an entire battle can snowball from an unlucky first encounter when a key unit is destroyed right off the bat. EAW has neither an in-depth morale system nor unit transports, and the mediocre pathfinding means that units will spend a lot of time tripping on each other. In short, to make the game more accessible to Star Wars fans, the RTS elements -- while innovative and fun -- lack the depth that can define genre greats. Nevertheless, the Force is strong with this one. It's worth it for fans of Star Wars to see their dreams unfurl in pyrotechnic, high-tech 3D glory (careful, because this has some slowdown even on a high-end machine), and it's also worth it for RTS fans to see some of the most experienced and respected designers in the genre go to work on a truly innovative title with the backing of a major publisher. As the series gains clout, I'm sure we'll see more depth added to its expansions and sequels -- everything is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen...
Other Helpful Reviews for Star Wars: Empire at War
While not the greatest RTS ever made SW : EAW has more than enough going for it to be part of every RTS collection especially if you are a SW fan. Before i started to play this I was genuinely worried that I would be ... Read Full Review
Star Wars has a long history of RTS failures. Rebellion was a decent attempt that was marred by a clunky interface, and dry combat. There was Force Commander which featured flawed graphics, gameplay, and an abysmal sound... Read Full Review
