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Too chaotic no strategy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 16
Date: February 26, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Horrible gameplay. This game has absolutely very little tactics, it's all about who has the most units. I was hoping this would be more like C&C Generals, but instead its more like a crappy version of Warcraft where its all about rush tactics. I would strongly suggest trying the demo before wasting your money.

WARNING: DO NOT BUY THIS GAME

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 11
Date: June 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Many people (including my son) are getting an exception error every time they play the game. This renders it unplayable. Before you buy this game, go to the LUCASARTS technical support site (or, search the internet for "Empire at War" "Exception_Access_Violation") There are 576 posts at the LUCASARTS site complaining about this problem, from experienced computer geeks who have spent days or weeks trying to resolve it. And Lucas Arts has not come out with a reasonable fix. The latest patch (1.04) does not address it. Buy this game, and sorry will you be.

Played it for 3 hours before shelving it for other games

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: March 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Bought this game the day it was release. Installed it onto my computer and was gutted as soon as I tried to play it, there was an issue with it authentication the disk as the original in my drive. Went online and downloaded the patch and was please that it could now recognize the disk and I could start playing. The designers put a lot of effort into making the mechanics different from other strategy games, but making something different doesn't always mean an improvement.

I didn't really like the whole reinforcement mechanism and very limited units to start a battle with. I can give it a stretch and say that ok terrain on land battles could limit ground forces, but in space combat, if you send in 20 Star Destroyers into a system, space is vast enough to accommodate all your forces. What about all the epic battles from the movies? I found my self always bringing large forces to a battle then attaching and seeing what my limited forces could do and calling in reinforcements as the original invading party suffered losses. I much prefer the C&C, AOE, type of unit production and upgrades.

The resource management is basically do you build a mine on the planet to increase credits or not. You can send smugglers out to steal credits from the Imperials as well.

Space battles often got to a point where it was almost a stale mate and I would click on the fast forward button to accelerate game time and just wait several minutes until the enemy was destroyed. Not much fun in doing that.

The only part I enjoyed about the game was playing the Imperials and controlling Darth Vader in Land battles. He kicks some serious butt in the game.

Anyway, like the title says, I've played it for about 3 hours then when back to my other games like Rise of Nations and Dungeon Lords

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.

Fun and Disappointing

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: February 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

It appears that there is a ton of hype around this game. Commercials are being shown on TV, and SW fans are screaming it's the best thing since sliced bread. Please, don't buy into the hype. There are some things you need to know about this game before you make your final purchase decision.

The nifty graphics you see in the commercials is cinematic mode, where you can't control the battles, so you'll be spending approximatly 0.5% of your time looking at that. The rest you'll be in top down 2D overview.

The game is indeed a decent RTS, but it falls short of that. You see, the real problem is, it's basically Galactic Conquest mode from SW BattleFront 2, in an RTS style, with a few buildings. This is the story line mode. But yet, you can't play Galactic Conquest multiplayer, except a player vs player campaign mode. The other multiplayer features are just space or land skrimish maps. If you were hoping to play Co-Op or against a few friends in Galactic Conquest, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Which brings us to the next point. The skrimish battles in the campaign are indeed fun, but they start to get rather tedious and boring. So I have no idea why you'd want to bother playing multiplayer skirmish games at all. With basically 3 parts of the game to balance and polish, and only one of which being the major draw for storyline mode, it's obvious the only part that LucasArts focused on was Galactic Conquest. Some people like the ground combat, some people like the space combat. Nobody seems to like both equally, and many people don't like them at all.

The storyline was short. I found it rather too easy on easy mode, and very unforgiving of mistakes on medium. The Empire campaign was a piece of cake, and on both campaigns, you'll most likely find yourself bored of fighting the small battles halfway through, and start to auto-resolve every battle you can. You get a lot more losses this way, but half-way through you end up with plenty of resources to waste on ships. I suppose if you fought every space and ground battle yourself, you could drag both campaigns out to around 15 hours each, and I'm rounding up quite a bit. You'll also be bored. With auto-resolving halfway through, you end up with about 4-6 hours for each campaign. 12 hours isn't much gameplay off of a $50 game.

So, if multiplayer is boring and not well done, and campaign mode is short, that leaves us with Galactic Conquest Mode. Much like SW: BF1 and 2, you get set maps and starting spots. Who wants to bother with a small map? The large maps end up with the system being split among the factions, so you start the game with half the galaxy, or one faction controls most, or worse, you end up controlling two areas totally seperate. On the largest map, I tried it once and found myself being attacked on a planet I didn't realize I controlled, as it was on the other side of the map. There is no random map generator, and while I see indications that there might be some kind of campaign editor to create your own (where you don't have to spend 10 minutes on pause to figure out what to do at the start of the game), I can't find any info online or in the CD that it actually exists.

In short, another good Starwars game, but don't expect to be playing this for the 3 months following your purchase. Or possibly even three weeks. You might want to wait for the price to come down a bit, unless you are a die hard SW fan like me and just have to try it.

Too simple, too easy, too hyped

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: March 16, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I had been tracking Empire at War for awhile, and I did note that the developers wanted the game to be accessible to everyone, not just devoted RTS fans. I hoped that it wouldn't lead to an over-simplified game that RTS and Star Wars fans would be disappointed with. I was wrong.

I am a fairly enthusiastic Star Wars fan, and I was annoyed that the developers didn't stay true to the Star Wars universe all the way. First of all, they decided to design new ships exclusively for the game! There are already hundreds of ships in the expanded universe! Why they couldn't just pick some out of that list, I don't know. The new Assault Frigate Mk 2 I am particularly disappointed with, because the original Assault Frigate was one of my favorite ships. Another thing is that the Rebels in Galactic Conquest mode have to STEAL ALL THEIR TECHNOLOGY from the Empire! That just made no sense to me. Now, on to the gameplay.

I looked forward to the awesome space and land battles. I was disappointed here too. The land maps are cramped, leaving no room for combat tactics. Everything is simply a fight to see who has the biggest number of strong units. It's the same way in space. Space combat is entirely 2D! That just killed it for me. Space maps are just as big as the land maps, meaning they are tiny. The unit cap in space battles is a mere 25 for the Rebels and 20 for the Empire! Also, Star Destroyers and Calamari Cruisers take up 4 slots, so there will never be any real big fights.

(Note: If you own Homeworld 2 and are looking for the best Star Wars space combat RTS to date, check out the Star Wars Warlords mod for Homeworld 2. http://warlords.swrebellion.com It's amazing!)

The Galactic Conquest mode is where this game really shines. If you have ever played the old Star Wars strategy game Rebellion, things will look slightly familiar. You'll see a map of the galaxy, with a number of planets that you will fight for. However, in Rebellion it was turn-based. In Empire at War, it is real time. I thought I would like real time gameplay more, but when you have control of 25 planets and have multiple fleets and armies to manage, turn-based gameplay would feel like heaven.

AI is one of the major faults of the game. The computer opponents have no real tactics or strategy in the land/space battles, they simply throw their units at you, or wait for you to come engage them. You'll also occasionally find some enemy units sitting in the corner of a map, doing nothing. It's good that there's multiplayer available.

The cinematic camera is one of my few personal plusses to this game. When I'm sure I'd be able to defeat the enemy army/fleet, I simply give out a few last orders and kick back to watch the cinematic view.

To conclude, Star Wars Empire at War will feel more like an appetizer to RTS and Star Wars fans. If you are not really experienced to RTS's or to computer games in general, Empire at War will probably be fun. But for the rest of us, we will wait for the main course, if there ever is one.

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.

Nice Graphics but no heart

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: March 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is just more of the same Real Time Strategy gaming we ahve seen in the past but with a splash of Star War Paint. After a few games it is hard to tel the difference between space and groudn combat. You go thru the same motions, every thing is played out on a 2D battlefield (yes the graphics are 3d but the play area is only in 2 dimensions). This game is a big improvement over the last attempt (Star Wars: Rebellion) but suffers form the same plague. IT RELIES ON ITS STAR WARS THEME far too much and doesn't focus on playability.

Bottom line: Save you money or get Lord of the Rings Battel for Middle Earth II. Fun, enjoyable, and has more than a handful of unique features that put it above the usual RTS game. Star Wars Empire at War....boring.

Big let down!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: March 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I played the game on/off for several days playing the rebels, (I like challenges). My major problems are the space maps are not that big, with all the firepower the IMP displayed in the game does not matter since the AI is a joke, and the game ended too quick. By the time I was getting ready to enjoy the game with some decent cruisers for a change the game ended.

I would of love to play it through all the three movies, but it only centered on the first.

Very disappointed.

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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