Star Wars: Empire at War is an RTS game developed by Petroglyph and was probably the first successful RTS based on the Star Wars franchise. And after playing through both the Rebellion and Empire campaigns, it's easy to see why. Petroglyph have managed to do a fantastic job of capturing the feel of Star Wars in an RTS format.
Stuff I liked
Persistent campaign
In a rare move for RTS games, SW:EAW actually features persistent campaign maps and technology tree. This has always been one of the things which bugs me about most RTS games. Generally, after completing a mission, you lose all your research or buildings for the next mission. This fundamentally doesn't make sense and is a pitfall which Petroglyph managed to avoid by having a galaxy map where you have your persistent campaign followed by missions consisting of land or space battles involving units which you built up in the galaxy map.
Granted, this approach is quite common now but I suspect it was a wee bit rarer when this game was first released.
Major heroes
SW:EAW also features the major heroes that you see in the original Star Wars trilogy and its a real blast to control them on the field of battle. Particularly so as the heroes tend to be quite powerful and able to turn the tide of battle single-handedly. For example, Darth Vader can use his force abilities to devastate both vehicles and infantry. In addition, his lightsaber automatically reflects a portion of blaster fire back at enemy troops. In general, the only time Vader is at risk is if you send him in on his own against overwhelming forces (and if you are stupid enough to do that, then you deserve to lose his services).
With that said, even if you do lose the hero, its not a big deal as the game will regenerate the hero after a portion of time. This is a good approach as it means that you won't worry about throwing your heroes into battle as you know that you can get them back and which then allows you to experience some of the cooler powers that the heroes have.
Death Star
Probably the most awesome thing about the Empire campaign is the Death Star itself. Near the end of the campaign, you get hold of the Death Star. And it is as awesome as you would expect.
Once you get the Death Star, any space battle you take it into starts off with a timer. Once the timer counts down to zero, that means that the planet is now within range of your Death Star. At that point, pulling down on the Death Star firing lever activates a nice video of your Death Star blowing the planet into a giant Asteroid Field. What makes this doubly awesome is that you don't automatically win the battle if there are still enemy ships around - instead, you have to defeat the remaining armada but now with the awesome backdrop of a recently destroyed planet.
Space battles
The space battles in this game are consistently awesome. After building up your fleet in the galaxy map, you then select a planet to move to. If there is an opposing fleet there, then battle ensues (normally, you would know if there is an opposing fleet or not as you would usually scout out the target first).
Once you enter combat, you don't actually bring your entire fleet with you. In any combat, you have a limited number of points to spend on ships (with bigger ships costing more points) and generally, your fleet is going to be much bigger than the number of points worth of ships that you can actually deploy. In practice, this makes the battles manageable as you are only controlling a smaller number of units.
Which isn't to say that there isn't any point in building a big fleet. As the battle progresses, you are going to lose units. As you lose units, this frees up some of your points which you can then use to bring in reinforcements from the main fleet. Its a good system which, in addition to keeping the number of units manageable, also adds an additional element of tactics as you consider which type of reinforcements to bring in.
Petroglyph have also done a decent job with AI in the space battles as the enemy ships try to maneuver to take advantage of any terrain. For example, some of the maps contain asteroid fields. Asteroid fields are dangerous to larger ships so your capital ships will want to avoid them. Meanwhile, smaller ships, like Y-wings and tie bombers, can maneuver through them safely while remaining hidden from sensors. As a result, the enemy often sends in bombers via asteroid fields which caught me by surprise the first time I encountered it.
Stuff I didn't like
Land battles
Unfortunately, the land battles are considerably less fun primarily due to poor AI. Although you have to contend with terrain, there isn't much in the way of environment hazards which basically means that land battles turn into a constant stream of enemies coming at you in waves until you destroy the factory that spawns them. Trust me when I say that it gets old fast when you have to repeat this multiple times for the various planets that you have to conquer.
Which makes the appearance of the Death Star near the end of the Empire campaign all the more awesome as you can avoid the land battles altogether. :)
AT-AT walker
This is related to the land battles but one of the things I really didn't like was how weak the AT-AT walker was. The AT-AT is one of the iconic images from the Star Wars movies and all throughout the rebellion campaign, I had been looking forward to facing off against them. However, when I finally did see them - what a letdown!
The problem is that, although the AT-AT is great against other vehicles, its pretty much useless against infantry. In game, it relies completely on other units to defend it from infantry which meant that I was able to destroy most AT-ATs by simply swarming them with my own infantry instead of having to rely on my speeders. I can understand why this was done - for game balance - but still, it was really disappointing.
Closing thoughts
Overall, I really enjoyed my time with SW:EAW. It's a lot of fun - made all the more so by the fact that I'm such a fan of the Star Wars universe. With that said, I have to admit that without the Star Wars franchise, I wouldn't have enjoyed the game as much as I actually did.
The land battles, although providing some variety to the game, end up detracting from the overall experience of the game owing primarily to how weak the land battles are. Midway through the campaign, you just wish the land battles would end and although the game allows you to auto-resolve combat - the thought of losing so many units (and hence resources) from not taking control myself stopped me from ever using it.
Still, considering the amount of fun I had with the space battles, I have to give this game a thumbs up.
