Star Wars: Empire at War
Review
This is still just your average RTS
by jdarksun
reviewed on PC
...The More Star Systems Will Slip Through Your Fingers (cntd.)
Altogether, I felt like the UI was working against me. Forcing me to issue orders in real time didn't make it more exciting, it made me feel like I had less control. Watching the AI waltz through what I thought was a pretty good line of defence just made the matter worse - it wasn't clear that I had left a planet that the AI could get to relatively undefended. It also doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, because once you enter a space or ground battle, the Galactic game stops anyway (time supposedly still passes, but your units stop building and you can't issue orders elsewhere in the galaxy). Taking this "Real Time" extension to its logical conclusion would mean allowing for multiple simultaneous battles on different planets with the ability to reinforce any of them as the battle progresses. This might be even more difficult to manage, but at least it would be consistent.
There's also an odd twist to this in multiplayer games - you can't play out battles against the neutral faction, and the AI does a horrible job of managing your units. Losses are often 3-4x what they would have been had you controlled the battle yourself. I'm sure this is in there to keep the action fast-paced for both players (Galactic Conquest multiplayer is only available to two players), but it just winds up being a gamble. "Will I be able to hold this planet long enough to offset the losses I suffered taking it?"
Don't Underestimate The Force
I've painted a pretty bleak picture so far, but it's not all that bad. The interface is something that, if you're dedicated enough or just "get it", you can work with it. It also opens up several new and interesting strategies that haven't been available in this medium - like being able to retreat your troops out of a battle. It allows you to fight a moving battle, jockeying for position amongst the stars as you inflict what damage you can before losing troops you can't expend. A retreat properly coupled with the Rebel's ability to conduct "raids" yields the sort of guerilla warfare that is exactly how I imagined the Rebels to fight. Hit, run, and hit again.
Empire at War's technology tree, as shallow and narrow as it is, still manages to have an interesting twist. The Rebels can't innovate by themselves - they have to steal technology from the Empire. The poor Empire has to develop technology by devoting a valuable ground build slot to a research station. Both sides are required to expend credits to get the technology they want. It can also place a Rebel player in an awkward position if the Empire chooses not to advance past tech stage 3 - although stage 5 allows you to build the Death Star. Yup, you read that right: the Empire can build the Death Star and go flying around destroying planets. It's quite a power trip.
I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing
The combat in Empire at War is also a mixed bag. In the Galactic Conquest game type, you can't actually produce units - you're forced to rely on what you brought with you (if you're the attacker), or the rate at which the buildings on your planet produces troops (if you're the defender). The number of units you can deploy in ground battles is limited by the number and type of reinforcement points you control. They're easy to find, can only be captured by infantry, and have a point value associated with them; when you capture (or lose) that point, your unit cap is raised (or lowered) by that amount. On the offensive, you deploy additional units by calling in reinforcements. Pressing the "reinforce" button opens up a little window with a list of available unit types and quantity, which then must be dragged within the circle of influence around a control point.
It takes a little bit of time for units to deploy, but you can deploy them to any of the reinforcement points you control - which is good, because each "unit" is actually a collection of troops that take up a fair bit of room. This in turn is both a blessing and a curse, because while it allows you to have sizeable conflicts despite the low unit cap, individual pathing is pretty bad and you can't move in formation. This leads to the all the typical control issues I hoped I had seen the last of in 1998 (with Starcraft) - the lack of precise control causes units to race to their destination without any regard to what's going on around them. Bottlenecks are incredibly common, with smaller or quicker (and thus weaker) units racing ahead of the larger, slower units. This makes for some frustration when fighting against the AI, as the computer tends to make aggressive use of the units that effectively counter yours. Your units don't act with the same enthusiasm; while the AI will switch targets to take out the biggest threat first, yours will continue to follow whatever action they thought they were issued at the time.
Empire at War's pseudo-"Rock / Paper / Scissors" system has its strengths and weaknesses, too. There's no simple rule of thumb to follow like with "historic" RTSes (pike beats horse, horse beats archers, archers beat pike). The system is often unintuitive, and there are a couple of cases that are downright bizarre. Take the Rebel's Plex Soldiers (infantry armed with an anti-vehicle weapon) as an example - they're billed as good at countering just about every ground vehicle the Empire has to offer. This includes the Empire's anti-infantry vehicle, the TIE Marauder - which is billed as good at countering any infantry. How is it that a unit is both strong and weak versus another unit? Doesn't being incredibly vulnerable to the opposing unit's attack prevent you from being an effective counter-unit? Because of this, I found certain unit types to be virtually useless. Why build TIE Marauders when Stormtroopers are significantly more effective against infantry units (and can capture reinforcement points, and are cheaper), and why build Rebel Infantry Platoons when Plex Soldiers are vastly more effective against vehicles (which is 95-99% of the Empire's army)? The game stays fairly true to the Star Wars universe by not adding a plethora of never-seen-before unit types, but the gameplay suffers as a result - you can wind up trying to build only two or three unit types instead of taking advantage of all of them.
7.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
