Star Wars: Empire at War
Review
This is still just your average RTS
by jdarksun
reviewed on PC
You Just Watch Yourself. We're Wanted Men
But there are special types of units that wind up changing the pace of things, and they can basically be summed up as "heroes". Hero units come in two varieties. The first are generic heroes, such as "Land" and "Space" Commanders (that increase the view range and hit points of the units they can influence) and Smugglers (which steal credits from enemy planets). The second type is more specialized "named" hero units that bear familiar faces. They run the gamut of typical - such as Darth Vader, Han Solo and Chewbacca, and Red Squadron - to the atypical and surprising - like Kyle Katarn and Mara Jade. They make appropriate and interesting appearances in the Story Mode, and generally have the ability to change the tide of a battle (not all of the heroes have extraordinary combat abilities, but most do).
Luckily, the game also gives you the opportunity to neutralize enemy heroes (for a time) with - you guessed it - bounty hunters. The generic flavor looks like Boushh (like Leia's disguise in Return of the Jedi, which I thought was a nice touch), and Boba Fett makes an appearance as hero in service of the Empire.
It's Not Wise to Upset a Wookiee
If the game could be judged on Star Wars flavor alone, it would easily rank alongside TIE Fighter. Unfortunately, Empire at War has holes large enough for a space slug in it. The first thing that jumped out at me were the typos in the manual (in the first freaking paragraph describing the game - "...conquer each every enemy controlled planet"?!), not critical by itself, but generally indicative of larger problems. Sure enough, there was a release-day patch, followed by another patch the next day. Now, given a choice between having bugs fixed and leaving them to spoil things, I chose the patches - but I'd rather the game was bug-free from the go. The patches fixed things like multiplayer being virtually unplayable. They also deleted my hot keys.
The voice acting isn't anything to write home about, either. Some of them are pretty good - the guy who imitates Harrison Ford is pretty believable - but some of them are quite bad. The voice of Lord Vader falls into that category. The models for non-vehicles (such as Vader, Stormtroopers, individual Rebels...) have a very low polygon count, which is not an issue when you're crushing them under the feet of AT-ATs, but is rather obvious during the cut scenes. These issues and the problems with the unit balance and control makes the game feel unpolished, like it wasn't ready to be shipped. Galactic Conquest mode doesn't feel complete either, which was the big "new" thing offered in Empire at War.
The Force Will Be With You, Always
Having to write a conclusion for this is very disappointing. Star Wars: Empire at War has amazing potential - its use of Star Wars material is astounding. It breaks new ground by detailing the events between Episode III and IV, and manages to incorporate an incredible amount of Expanded Universe material as well. The atmosphere exceeded even what I had hoped for, which is a monumental accomplishment.
But the atmosphere isn't everything. The gameplay is sorely lacking, failing to implement many features typical in modern RTS games as well as failing to expertly implement enough unique features for the game to stand on its own merit. While it does contain quite a bit of interesting content, the effort required to get to it all requires the player to be a die-hard fanatic for Star Wars, RTS games, or (preferably) both.
7.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
