by Andrew Vawter - February 17, 2006

Star Wars: Empire at War is the latest game to bear the Star Wars brand name. Generally Star Wars games in the strategy genre have tended to be a let down in the past (Galactic Battlegrounds, Force Commander). Star Wars: Empire at War attempts to merge all elements of the Star Wars universe from both the movies and the Expanded Universe into one consistent universe.

A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away…

Star Wars: Empire at War is a real time strategy game that takes place both on a planet’s surface, in space, and on the galactic map across 46 ground and space locations from the Star Wars movies and Expanded Universe.

The galactic map acts as a place to plan what buildings you’ll build on a planet, what ships you’re going to produce, and finally where you’ll position your forces.

All units that you’ll build in the game require credits. From simple Stormtroopers to buildings on a planet’s surface or even the Death Star, you’ll be allocating the limited credits available to you into building units. Credits are earned in Star Wars: Empire at War fairly simply.

By default, each planet you own produces some amount of credits and you can improve the output by building additional mines on a planet. These mines take up a building slot on the planet which are limited in that each planet has a different number of available building slots so you’ll tend to end up with some planets that are your production planets and others that are your money makers. This tends to make things rather interesting, as losing a planet that produces a lot of credits will severely harm your income but losing a planet that can actually spend that income is even more devastating. So at the end of the day, you’ll have a real incentive to protect all the planets you control. Galactic conquest takes time because of this, as you’ll need to protect all of your planets equally while at the same time putting pressure on the enemy.

Space combat starts whenever two fleets of ships encounter each other in the galactic map. The game will enter a paused state and give you the option to either fight it out yourself or to start an auto battle. Be warned, auto battle is useful only when you have a clear advantage. The auto battle tends to cost you a lot more than if you fight the battle yourself (this is true for both space and ground assaults).

Space combat is limited to 20 "unit points" per side meaning that you can only have so many ships on the screen. A fighter squadron will cost you one point while larger ships cost more. Fortunately, just because you brought a fleet of 40 ships doesn’t mean the others are left doing nothing instead you can call in reinforcements to replace destroyed ships. Unfortunately, you can’t remove a heavily damaged ship from the fray without giving the order to withdraw your entire force.

In order to win a space battle, all you have to do is completely destroy the other side or destroy enough of their forces for them to withdraw. Almost all units have special abilities that can be activated (most ships have one, while most hero units have two): X-wings can "lock s-foils" which increases their speed but decreases firepower, while an Imperial Star Destroyer can increase its rate of fire while sacrificing the rate at which its shields regenerate. Also Y-wings and TIE Bombers are extremely useful because they can target a capital ship’s subsystems and disable key systems such as the shield generator or weapons platforms on ships.

Ground combat works a lot like space combat. All of your units have special actions and there is a unit limit that varies by planet. Winning an engagement varies as well. If you are defending a planet the idea is to capture all of the landing zones and then proceed to kill any hostile units still on the planet. Attackers, on the other hand, will start at a landing zone and their objective is to destroy the enemy base.

The defender will always have the advantage here simply because whatever buildings they have built in the galactic map will help them here. Barracks will automatically turn out Stormtroopers or Rebel Soldiers for free. The planet’s inhabitants will either support you or attack you depending on whether or not the inhabitants support your faction. For the most part, these non-faction units are little more than fodder, but they do take a few hits before they go down.

Lastly, hero units are unique units in the game that convey special abilities to the planet at which they’re stationed. Characters like Emperor Palpatine make any production built at the planet that he’s at cost 25% less, whereas Han Solo has the ability to steal credits from an enemy planet. All of the hero units are useful. Some of them also have unique units which convey additional bonuses in combat. Also nice to see is that if you do lose a hero unit in combat, it will come back to life after a few game days.

Rather Scruffy Around the Edges

Star Wars: Empire at War has fairly good graphics, but there’s nothing here that’ll push your quad Geforce 7800GTX computer to its limits. Space battles tend to look the best, while combat on the ground is sadly a little bland. Even on the highest graphics settings, the font used for the in game text (for units when they are speaking) in Star Wars: Empire at War comes off to be a little fuzzy. As such, it’s pretty distracting. Other than this minor detail, graphics are good enough for any modern real time strategy game. Worth mentioning as well is the option to switch into a cinematic camera mode. This mode allows you to get either a ground level view of a fight or a movie style camera view of a battle in space. It’s greatly improved over what was in the Star Wars: Empire at War demo, but you probably won’t be using it that much as you can’t give orders in this view.

No New Hope for Sound

All the sound options you’re used to seeing are in Star Wars: Empire at War; everything from Miles 2D stereo sound to Dolby Digital surround sound. In the game, sounds are good with an authentic Star Wars feel. The music is traditional and sounds like it all came from one Star Wars movie or another. The overall audio experience is good, but nothing feels truly inspired that would make it worth writing about.

Han Solo Shot First

There are a few shortcomings in Star Wars: Empire at War that prevent this game from being a classic. It gets sort of repetitive. First you have to show up and establish control of an area of space surrounding a planet, and then you have to go down to the planet and establish control over it. So you wind up fighting two battles for every planet you attempt to take over. Also because the auto resolve A.I. puts no emphasis on keeping nearly destroyed units out of the fight, you tend to wind up losing a lot more units than you would if you commanded every fight yourself. This leads you to personally take command of every fight. So you’ll wind up fighting not only the big important battles but the small ones that you don’t really care about.

Some units feel really overpowered. X-wings and Y-wings are more useful than heavier ships. So currently in order to win a battle, all you need to do is bring a half and half mix of 20 or so squadrons to every space battle and you’ll win almost every time. Hopefully, this will be fixed in the future with a patch, as this has been the only glaring flaw with unit balancing. (And it’s only the X and Y wings; it doesn’t apply to the TIE Fighter or TIE Bomber.)

So is the Force Strong With This One?

Star Wars: Empire at War has a very good enemy AI that’s fun to play. The AI will often try to maximize damage while at the same time retreat when it becomes clear they’ve dealt as much damage as they can. This applies in both the ground and space combats. The skirmish maps have their own ongoing missions that are generated while you play the game. Sometimes you’ll be asked to neutralize an enemy hero or you may be asked to go and capture some planet for your side.

The single player campaign follows the movies fairly closely. It starts you off when the Rebellion steals the X-wing design from a planet that is about to be "Nationalized" by the Empire. There are multiple factions represented in the game although only the Empire and the Rebellion are playable. However, key members of the Rebel Alliance do show up in the game including Bothans, Ewoks, Wookiees, Mon Calamari, and more.

I’ve Got Nothing

The Star Wars universe is in full swing throughout the game. Characters from both the movies and the Expanded Universe will show up throughout the game. This game has a lot going for it. In Star Wars: Empire at War you’ll find battles all over the place on worlds with recognizable landscapes. There is a lot of fun to be had throughout the game. This is a great pickup for any Star Wars fan and a very good pickup for any real time strategy gamer looking for something in the style of Command & Conquer.