GAME PLAY
Empire at War takes the old RTS (real-time strategy) formula and
adds it's own unique features; unfortunately, not all changes are
improvements. The main goal is still to construct bases, build units
and destroy your enemy's forces, but now it's on a galactic scale.
Empire at War focuses less on creating structures and more on
combat. This may sound like a good thing on paper; however, it ends
up making the game play rather bland. Even the combat itself seems
to have been simplified, usually you can upgrade your soldiers and
use special abilities; units that do have abilities only have one or
two, and the only buffs are passive bonuses to health regeneration
and firing range. The game starts out slow with you only being able
to use a few different units, like storm troopers, AT-STs and
speeder bikes. But, in the first mission of the Imperial campaign,
you get to control Darth Vader; who, as you would expect, is
incredibly powerful. Along with being able to kill infantry units
with one hit, Vader can utilize his force powers to kill several
nearby infantry units and crush a vehicle in a matter of seconds.
After the first mission you’re free to use him whenever you want,
most of the time he's able to complete objectives on his own.
All of the game's battles play out in
the same way, with little variation. First you build a fleet of
various ships, choose a planet to conquer, then send in your fleet
to destroy the defending space forces. After winning, you send your
ground forces onto the planet's surface to destroy the opposition
there. After winning both battles the planet is under your control
and you're free to fortify it with a space station and other
structures. As you progress through the various story driven
missions your technology level will increase, granting you more
advanced structures and more powerful vehicles.
The two factions don't have very many
game play differences. The Imperials have to use research to gain
access to new technologies and focus more on using large vehicles to
vaporize enemies. The Rebels are more infantry and small vehicle
oriented, and must steal technological plans from the Imperials in
order to get new units. Both sides are able to employ smugglers to
steal credits from enemy planets, and bounty hunters to quickly and
silently take out enemy minor heroes like fleet commanders and
smugglers.
DIFFICULTY
As a long time fan of RTS games, I have to say that Empire at War
was disappointing. The main flaw is that there isn't a whole lot of
strategy involved, you can win almost any battle by gathering all
your troops and swarming the enemy positions until they succumb to
your forces. The only real strategy is to use your knowledge of
rock, paper, scissors to direct certain units to attack the right
unit types. For example, let's say you have a squad of rebel
soldiers, and a squad of rocket soldiers. Your enemy has a squad of
storm troopers and a squad of AT-STs, so you order your rocket
soldiers to attack the AT-STs, and your normal soldiers to attack
the stormtroopers. That's pretty much the only strategical part of
the game.
Overall the enemy AI isn't very
intelligent; as a result, ground battles play out the same way every
time. The AI will tend to swarm your starting area with almost all
of their infantry and a majority of their vehicles. The initial push
will leave both sides with few units left, then you're free to call
in your reinforcements and decimate what's left of their base
defenses. In space battles, the enemy ships will mostly cluster
around their space station, firing at random targets. Unless they
have a large number of ships you won't lose many units in space,
you're free to neutralize the hard points on their space station,
then gun down the stragglers.
AUDIO
There isn't a whole lot to say about the audio effects in this game
since for the most part you're viewing the action from a distance.
The sound is more or less perfect in Empire at War, the voice
acting, turbo laser fire and other miscellaneous sounds are all
terrific.
GRAPHICS
On the maximum settings, the visuals in Empire At War are very nice.
The textures and fire/smoke effects look great; unfortunately, the
game will start to lag horribly once you get too many units on the
screen (mostly during space battles). But there's no need to worry,
even on the lowest settings everything still looks decent. The
blurry textures aren't much of an issue when you're zoomed out and
issuing commands across the battlefield. Even on the low settings,
all the units still have a tremendous amount of detail put into
them; the imperial cruisers have a very defined look to them and the
storm trooper armor is accurate. A nice touch is the storm trooper
squads will change their armor depending on the climate of the
planet they're fighting on. They'll be wearing snow trooper armor on
colder planets, sandtrooper armor on desert planets and the standard
issue set for all others.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I can appreciate how the
developers were trying to capture the large-scale conflict in Star
Wars, but it just didn't work out too well.
|
THE GOOD |
- units are very
detailed
- backgrounds and terrain are well laid out
- well-built interface |
|
THE BAD |
- tactics don't
play a big role
- buildings aren't very important |
|
THE RAD |
- able to
command important vehicles like the Death Star
- able to use heroes like Boba Fett and Han Solo
- large scale battles |
SCREENSHOTS
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