Star Wars: Empire at War (PC)

Graphics

Empire at War excels quite nicely in the graphics department for the space battles, but then the ground battles and units let it down with some flat and pretty uninspired character and unit models. Even the game’s heroes seem a little drab when you look at things, the camera has been forced into a specific set angle even when it is unlocked in the options; it is still pretty hard to get a good tactical awareness.

The graphics are a mixed bag, in space they have some beautiful explosions and some excellent damage mechanics, but the ground sections again feel as though they’ve been glossed over and given a cursory look before the developers went back to space battles and grinned at the sight of a Star Destroyer being torn in two with a sudden flash and bang of pretty lights.

This is also the same with the maps, in space they’re beautiful and full of detail but on the ground they’re all fairly similar and bland in places, the tundra of Hoth might as well be the stinky swamp of Dagobah.

AI

There are some very prevalent AI problems with the game, path-finding seems to be a hit and miss affair for the ground battles and units will often do some pretty dumb things, the enemy will Zerg-Rush you with units and ignores complex tactics, often just throwing the biggest thing it can bring out into the fray.

In space however things are often vastly different as the enemy will often hide bombers or fighters in asteroid fields, nebulae and the like. It will protect its strongest asset with weaker fighters and try to keep you occupied; there are at least some tactics to its assault.

Music

It’s as good as it gets with several John Williams classic pieces as well as all new music created for the game.

Sound effects

With a tonne of stock sounds to draw from the game’s developers couldn’t go far wrong with this one, so they have kept to the feel of the movies with the convincing scream of the Tie fighter and the roar of the Falcon’s engines as blasters both in space and ground fire off all around.

Voice Acting

The performances range from good to excellent, but mostly they stay on the excellent side with a superb rendition of Luke Skywalker and the best take of Han Solo yet provided to boot. The rest of the characters are all reasonable and well acted with decent dialogue and an in-theme script.

Multiplayer

You can play the Skirmish battles with/against friends; if you play them with friends then you share the same base/resources and can pool your talents to take down the enemy.

You can play Galactic Conquest against a single player, this is something that I liked the idea of but I would have liked to see team play implemented as well, so you can team up with a friend against the Empire or the Alliance.

Ah well, perhaps a mod or a patch or both.

Offline LAN play and Online net play are supported, the game however didn’t pull me enough to play it Online but I did have several Skirmish matches with a friend against the Empire and it was definitely fun, but later on we found ourselves getting rapidly bored of the vanilla play.

Final thoughts

Empire at War is undoubtedly the best use of the franchise RTS wise so far, it’s a good example that hopefully will spawn a much better sequel. It is let down by being repetitive and vanilla in the ground based battles, the lack of tactical options on ground are eclipsed by the wealth of options in space and I begin to wonder why they just didn’t concentrate on a space based RTS to begin with and add ground as an optional patch later on or even a cheap expansion.

Even the Heroes of the game aren’t enough to deliver it from being just a decent game, if you like Star Wars then you’ll probably like this game – but I like Star Wars and all I really can say is, better luck next time.

And no doubt, there will be a next time.

It’s high time the game industry woke up to the fact that a franchise isn’t just going to be an instant hit based on the name, things are changing and the recent cut-backs and crumbling development software houses are proving that their customers are becoming more and more discerning when they consider a game title based on an existing franchise.

When all is said and done, there’s potential here and fun to be had so it’s not as though this game is a wicked loss – I predict that since it’s heavily moddable there will be some good mods to come out of the already rabid fanbase, which for a mod-psycho like me is great news.

There’s still enough gameplay and content here to make it a very worthwhile game, it could have taken a few more months however for extra features and some much needed polish to really make it shine.