Star Wars: Empire at War

The Good
The game captures the Star Wars flair quite well - nothing better than to lead Mon Calamari space cruisers and Nebulon-B frigates into combat. Same goes for land combat.

The skirmish parts of the game on planet and in space are well done. In both cases you can't just mass the "strongest" units and dash forward. Every unit has strenghts and weaknesses and the AI knows how to exploit these. In both cases it doesn't come out to "the one with more/better troops wins". The planet side part is quite delicate, you need to capture reinforcement points to call in new troops and certain structure pads to build bacta tanks or gun emplacements. In space combat you can target specific parts of enemy ships/structures and the way you handle it has impact on the outcome of the battle. The way space combat is done suggests the developers had a close look at the SW space combat sims.

Graphics are quite nice - the galaxy view of the planets is quite an advancement compared to e.g. SW Rebellion.

The interface is intuitive and the tutorials are well made. If you don't like reading into game manuals and play right away instead this game will not be a problem for you.

The Bad
The game is not very complex and after a few days of play it becomes quite monotone. The goal of the game is to conquer other planets which means destroying their space assets and then moving in on their planetary defenses.

To do this you just build the required units at your planets and then assault the other ones. The AI isnt very imaginative, does not really stage counterattacks and basically just waits for you to take over its planets. You do have a few minor choices other than space-planet-battle but these are more complementary. Now and then you get special tasks which don't require you to do anything out of the ordinary but just follow your usual goals.

The Bottom Line
The game tries to unite the RTS genre with a broader strategic approach but there are much better games on both ends. The Star Wars settings might be appealing but cannot cover the low overall complexity.

It's nowhere near Starcraft or GalCiv so I would only recommend it to Star Wars fans only.

The Good
Always wanted to see what a Star Wars RTS looked like. Apparently curiosity killed the Jedi. This game obviously killed my mood for several days. :p

But I must admit, the concept to a certain level is very interesting. Gameplay consists of empire management and combat. Combat occurs on a space and land/planetary level. Though the concept in itself is very nice, in practice you can be assured it had more flaws than it did perks.

The Bad
Welcome Newbie RTS Gamers!
If you are a veteran RTS player, the first thing you'll notice is that this game wasn't created for the veteran RTS player. In fact, I figure this game was created for everyone except a veteran RTS player.

How do you know this? Well little things you notice the first time around like the short-keys haven't been assigned. Which is funny, I kept pressing Control F1 to group my units but the grouping never showed up. Apparently this isn't common knowledge or someone just forgot to assign short-keys which by the way are ALL unassigned.

And if you were to play the tutorial, then you'd really be offended. What is this RTS games for idiots?

The Rebels could have never won the war...
In this game, you can be assured that the Rebels cannot win the war. Why? Put this to logic. Out gunned, out manned, out moneyed (which probably isn't even a word either), out capital shipped (The empire has a lot of big ships), out everything. In fact, if you just combine all the Capital Ships of the Empire and attack the rebels, they'd probably just die like in the first week? :)

At least that's what happened to me. How in the hell do you fend off 10 capital ships anyways?

Units die way to fast
Haha. This is fun. Do you know how fast 20 squadrons of Y-wings can die? About 10 minutes. Only killed one capital ship too. Talk about unbalanced.

Tactical Combat - What tactical combat?
This is the part where you really, really know that someone didn't give this game much thought. So here you are, ready for another space combat. You have capital ships and fighter ships in numbers so high you can't even count. You move them all in the direction of the enemy.
Guess what. You can't choose who enters combat first. Hahahaha. Tactical combat my foot.

Ho-hum Story
I really don't recall every playing a crappy game from Lucas Arts, much less one of the best storyline gurus of all time. The storyline (campaign) is something you'd expect from "other" games, but not Lucas Arts. For crying out loud, the story in this game is an insult to Tie Fighter and Knights of the Old Republic.

The Bottom Line
The game gets to the point that its not even fun. I expected more from LucasArts. This game is NOT standard LucasArts quality.

Maybe I'll update this review in the near future since I don't feel I've insulted it enough. :p

The Good
Finally I have converted Mon Mothma to the evil side...I mean the dark side and I had long foreseen this.

MY forces were scattered through the tiny,dusty galaxy of 43 planets, but I have log passed over their incompetence of holding battles and supervised with my servant, Vader, all their operations; that the path to the dark side of the force!

Even if I got bored at some times, at destroying space stations and various cannons and people's homes, the price was finally paid off after 2 days of BitComet and another of crack finding. Now my mission has been accomplished.

I was never so satisfied since Rebellion first came with its 200 planets and diplomacy /sabotage model which unfortunately cannot be found here.Here lies the path to the dark side of the Force!

Truly this is the Galactic Empire! Truly the enemy is a rebellion and not another empire with ISD's alternate names.

The Bad
Well,despite the great realism of this game, great graphics, great feeling of Star Wars, there's still room for improvement: no diplomacy, spying is rather silly, no sabotage, few planet slots, so the whole thing still looks grossly diminished:

There are no fleets of hundreds of ships with tens of thousands of fighters, like in Master of Orion 3, no ship free-modeling, (after all, they had to respect the franchise), no complicated strategy options like in Call to Power, no hundreds of troops in a battle,just a few at the same time, deployed through the reinforcement points.

The computer cheats: he always knows the exact location of your troops, has no need of reinforcement points to deploy its own troops and if you choose to auto-resolve a battle, you will lose 5 times more than in actual combat.

The Bottom Line
The best Star Wars strategy game to date: with great realism, ships have accurate number of weapon mounts, the ratio is accurate (Death Star costs 20k credits, one Stormtrooper squadron just 52, which is made of 2*5 troops, so one costs 5 credits), troops are realistically overpowered over armor which can crush them, heroes are well balanced, a little bit too overpowered, though (in reality terms), but it cannot be compared to Rebellion strictly in strategy-smartness terms.