Star Wars: Empire at War

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