Well with my computer back up and running I finally had a chance to try out the new Star Wars strategy game "Empire at War".
With dissapointments such as the old Age of Empires clone "Galactic Battlegrounds" I had my doubts about a Star Wars strategy game.
The ground battles are good but not great. Perhaps it is just the scale which is wrong: In the old movies there weren't that many truely big ground battles except for the battle of Hoth. You were either really up close following only a few characters in small fights or there were the epic space battles.
As a result many of the units and tanks aren't really that sexy - except of course for the AT-AT ?
(Ok running around as Palpatine is kinda cool as well... except for some corny dialogue, but hey: It's Star Wars!)You have to secure landing zones in order to bring in new units to the battle which is nice because it forces you to fight agressively. On the other hand it is a bit frustrating that you can only have a limited number of units on the battlefield at one time. If you've just spent a king's ransom building a big assault force you want to hit the enemy with everything you got!
Regardless of how you might feel about the ground combat the bit which really makes this game shine is the Space battles! I mean GOD DAMN! ?
? ? ?Again you have some limitations to the ammount of ships present at any one time but who cares: 5 Star Destroyers still kick some serious butt! The graphics are better than the old XvT flight simulators (obviously) but I was still surprised just how nice they were for a strategy game! A nice feature is, that once you've selected targets for your units you can switch to cinematic mode which has some cool dynamic camera angles.
Here's a few shots:
You can't help but humming along on the Imperial March once you take command of your own personal Death Star... ?
You also have to deal with a few traitor Imperial captains...
Die rebel scum!
