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Empire at War is Pure Fun!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: July 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The game is great. I agree with a lot of what most say that LucasArts finally had a developer (Petroglyph) create a Real Time game in the Star Wars universe worth playing. The first attempt Rebellion was a lack luster game. It was good but not great. The replay factor was small, where as this game is so good, not only with the graphics but with the lack of micro management that can happen a lot with most real time games. Galactic Battlegrounds I felt I was playing Age of Empires, not real exciting, somewhat boring.

The strategy in EAW is excellent, with reinforcements, bombing runs, a cool planetary resource system and good unit balance. Battles in space are just epic and with cinematic camera you are part of the action. Graphics are very detailed especially with a good video card. The story mode is great and spans 43 planets. They also have a fun skirmish and multiplayer mode. BTW these modes ROCK! This is the only RTS I know that has a team multiplayer mode that really caters to team play. I would recommend Empire at War to every SW fan or any RTS player.

With the new expansion Forces of Corruption due out in the next few months, this game is only going to get 10x better.

Star Wars Strategy as it should be

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: January 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

For those not familiar with Star Wars strategy games, Empire at War combines the best aspects of all the previous titles. It is a definite improvement over Rebellion, incorporating part of its interface and making it more accesible, as well as simplifing many of the aspects of galactic managment. The tactical space battles are superb becoming by far the most entertaining aspect of the game. The tactical ground mode is also OK, using simplified resource managment as in Force Commander but with a friendlier interface such as in Galactic Battlegrounds. This is the Star Wars strategy game fans have been waiting for more than a decade.

Epicness like no other Star Wars game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 11
Date: April 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

A great Star Wars game, where you manage and deploy the armies of either the Empire or the Rebellion.

Fans of the films and expanded universe will love to wage war on over 40 space and planet-based maps, whether that may be in the urban depths of Coruscant, the icy landscape of Hoth or the vast plains of Naboo- everywhere is different and has its own advantages. On top of that, planet natives fight for your cause depending on what faction you are playing as. For example, when the Rebellion is battling on the forested Kashyyyk, the Wookiee natives take up arms and fight along side you against the Empire or Pirate minorities. All the war vehicles from the films are controllable too. These include impressive Star Destroyers, AT-STs, swift A-Wings, Snowspeeders, the lumbering AT-ATs and even the Death Star itself which can obliterate an entire planet.

It is also good to see all your favourite heroes/villains in action, like Han & Chewbacca, the Emperor, Obi-Wan, Red Squadron, Boba Fett and of course Darth Vader, each with their own special abilities. An example is the Emperor's force lightning which can dispatch whole platoons of Rebel infantry.

In Empire at War, the graphics are well done and this game is very faithful to the Star Wars films and back-stories. The controls are easy to learn as the tutorials are reasonably helpful, covering all aspects of gameplay. Also this game doesn't spend too much time on all that resource managing which some other games of this genre sometimes tend to. In Empire at War you simply construct mining buildings on resource-rich planets like Coruscant or Kessel and you're away!

Overall this is excellent, but it is annoying that there is a limit to how many forces you may deploy on a planet and in space. However, the epicness is still there, especially when you can control massive Star Destroyer fleets or the Rebellion's equally impressive Mon Cal Cruisers.

Disappointing...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: May 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I spent some four+ years of being an über Star Wars fan and spent a whole three years anxiously anticipating Star Wars Episode III (which blew me away), and I saw Empire at War as something with great potential!

Except I wasn't very excited about it, and didn't rush out to buy it.

Now I got the chance to play it and... I'm very disappointed.

The campaign map for galactic conquest moves very very slowly, with a sluggish start for credits, super expensive ships, and an assload of buildings to be built before you can even start building capital ships of any importance. Also, auto-resolving any battle immediately unbalances the battle giving the enemy the upper hand no matter how strong or numerous your forces are, so unless you fight each and every single battle yourself, you're bound to suffer exuberant casualties, and even lose some surefire victories.

The land battles are absolute trash. You start out with only enough room for five units (which is actually Troops, with one troop of AT-ST containing 4 AT-ST, 1 AT-AT, 6 Stormtroopers, etc) while the enemy can field as many units as they want initially. It takes a long time to call in reinforcements, while enemy units blow away at your units with little effort.

The space battles are the real core of the game. The space battles are the absolute best aspect of the game, despite their great flaws still. In the space battles, you can only field units up to 20 population cap (a single Star Destroyer takes up 4 pop cap!!!) and it takes way too long to destroy even the smallest of capital ships, so you pretty much sit there watching ships blast the [...] out of each other, with realistic location damage, for many many many minutes. Also, space battles can only occur when battling over a planet, so your mission is always either "Destroy enemy space station" or "Defend space station" The maps are also way too small, with your forces constantly scrunched together, held even further tightly packed by nebulae or asteroid fields or big fields of debris which block your units and do damage to your shields. Fighters are difficult to maneuver, also, and aren't very effective at anything save distracting other fighters. It's all about the capital ships, basically. And its all unbalanced in favor of the Rebels, who have the better variety of ships with better strengths and weaknesses (including the Mon Calamari cruiser, which is actually STRONGER than a Star Destroyer, and whose only weakness is the TIE bomber, which usually never survives to reach the hull of a Mon Cal cruiser)

All in all, terribly disappointing. It manages to keep me hooked for a brief while, but only for that brief while. This is no Battlefront, or Rome Total War, or Age of Empires, or Starcraft.

great when it works

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: May 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I initially played this game for about a week and enjoyed it very much. Then, without fanfare, the game started freezing..."an exception has occurred" followed by a lot of code references. This error happens seemingly at random...it might let you play for an hour before freezing, or it might freeze on the title screen, or it might freeze when you try to load or save a game. Now, I'm running what you might call a "gamer's rig" computer with a very powerful video card, lots of RAM, etc. so this game shouldn't crash. So I contacted LucasArts technical support, and, in about a week, they replied that I have to play the game on my computer is "Guest mode." I tried this and it does not work, it simply makes the error less frequent. LucasArts is now on the 1.04 patch for this game, which still fails to address the error. I am not alone with this problem...LucasArts technical support forum currently has a 500+ posting entry concerning this very problem. What I don't see however, is a lot of concern from LucasArts moderators, etc. It's like they don't even acknowledge that the error exists, which is certainly does. I've already contacted the Better Business Bureau regarding this completely poor product and have yet to recieve any reply from LucasArts. Well, they've got my money. Why should they care. Maybe it will work sometime in the future. For now, though, it's a very decorative pair of coasters.

Great game for Star Wars fans

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: February 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This was a heavily anticiptated game for all RTS and Star Wars fans out there. The game takes place during the era betwen episodes III-IV and features decent graphics with an average AI.

What prevented me from giving this 5-Stars is the omission of Super Star Destroyers, Tie Interceptors, and B-Wing fighters. Surely they could've added these ships into the game. Perhaps they will feature it on an expansion pack.

If you like RTS games or the Star Wars saga, get the game. The graphics wont wow you, but nonetheless it's fun to take control of either IMPERIAL or REBEL units and change the course of Star Wars history.

May the force be with you...

A delight for RTS & Star Wars fans.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: January 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game has all the elements of a good real-time strategy game and most of the heroes from the early Star Wars movies. It also has a smart storyline which connects the prequels to the original films. There are both space and land battles, but the space ones are far more elaborate and fun. The only problem with this game is the mutliplay. It uses the Gamespy network, which is notoriously unreliable, and doesn't force patch compliance. This means that there are usually very few players online sharing the same version and connections are laggy or simply not available. Just the same, this player fully enjoyed the single-player campaign.

Best Star Wars RTS Yet

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: March 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

In the past decade or so, the quality of lucas art's games have been a bit lacking. Its been a long time since classics like Tie Fighter, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Sam and Max, or Full Throttle graced the shelves of software stores. Ive played all of the so called Star Wars RTS games of the past and they have truly been found wanting, this latest installment manages to do everything about right.
-Sound-
If theres one thing Lucas Arts always does right, its music and sound, Empire at War is no exception. Theres plenty of different music tracks, from new and old trilogies, and none of them really get repetitive. Sound effects do a good job of pulling you into the game, still its pretty standard Star Wars fare, If youve seen the movies, youve heard the sounds.
-Graphics-
Overall the graphics are fairly impressive, even zoomed in the units dont look as bad as many do in other 3d RTS games. Theres plenty of explosions and heat distortion, maybe a little too much of the latter, but thats no big deal. Buildings and space units fall apart well enough, not as good as AOE III but theres really no reason to complain. Overall the graphics are top notch, and nothing here really detracts from the game.
-Gameplay-
With only two sides in the galactic war to chose from gameplay can get quite repetitive, and there are a few imbalances with the units. Also worth mentioning is the lack of some capital and starfighter class craft some might have expected. There are no B-wings, TIE Interceptors, Dreadnaughts, Carrack Class Cruisers, Lancer frigates, ...well I could go on. Anyways, there are a few craft in the game that could have been replaced by better known units, ie; the Tartan Cruisers could have been replaced with Lancer Frigates or even Carrack Cruisers, The TIE Scouts could have been replaced with TIE Interceptors, and each side could have benefited from a few more capital class ships. Some Hero units have a few too many hitpoints, others too few. I could ramble on, but nothing in the gameplay other than the fact that things can get alittle old really detracts from the experience.
-Replayability-
With a myriad of gameplay options replayability is decent considering you can only choose from 2 'civilizations'.

Overall this is the best Star Wars RTS yet, so if you dont have it and youre a fan, I would recommend picking this one up. Weve been burned before, but Lucas Arts has delivered this time.

Don't waste your money

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 11
Date: July 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I saw this game and thought to myself "Cool, a starwars RTS with potential." I was sadly mistaken. The game, even on hard, is insanely easy. The planetary battles are boring and slow with a rediculasly low unit cap, and the space battles are way to fast and easy. The AI for both is laughable.

I played the rebel campaign durring an 8 hour shift at work and thought it was boring. Then I tried the imperial campaign the next night at work and discovered this games takes "suck" to a whole new level.

On the galactic map, all you have to do to win is build level 5 stations on your planets. The AI will NEVER attack! I decided to test that out one night, so I started up a game and built level 5 stations on a couple planets, then went to bed. I woke up 7 hours later and I had over 10 million credits and the game was still running. In 7 hours the game wasn't stopped for a single combat.

Last but not least, the graphics. Even with everything set on high, the game play graphics are sub par. I've seen better on games I played on my old Sega Genisis. The cinimatics are fairly decient though, which is its only saving grace. Unfortunately, the majority of the cinimatics are computerized recreations of sceens in episodes 4-6.

Don't believe the hype.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: March 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

While many reviewers are insinuating that finally a decent Star Wars game has surfaced, beware! I decided to purchase this game solely on reviews I had read here and elsewhere. I was extremely disappointed when after only a few hours of playing I had mastered it completely and was left with nowhere else to go. I can now finish the game on the hardest setting in under 20 minutes.

There is no challenge, no replayability factor, and certainly nothing in-game worth experiencing again. What I'm stuck with now is a $50 piece of software that I will never use again.

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