Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Good fun October 7, 2008
I like the graphics and the game's features, having heros is fun, as well as the space stations and different forms of combat: space and land.
 A great Star Wars game.. September 30, 2008
Now this is a fun game for anyone who has ever wanted to command a fleet of star destroyers... Like me. Fun game, build up your forces for ground and space combat. Concur planets and set fleets to protect them, command legendary characters such as Luke, wedge, mon mothma, Vader, han solo, boba fett..
Absolutely worth a play.
 A little great, a little suck! September 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This game is, at various times, oodles of fun and a major test of patience.
I like "Star Wars". Always have. The video games for the series have generally been pretty good, too. Games like "X-Wing" and "TIE Fighter" (both aching for new versions. You listening, Lucasarts?), "Knights of the Old Republic", and the various "Lego Star Wars" games have all been excellent.
This game, sadly, departs from that legacy and is just... acceptable. Barely.
Don't get me wrong. Parts of it are great! The space battles are wonderfully fun! There's nothing like taking the Death Star and assaulting Alderaan, blowing it to smitherines and cackling all the while!
On the other hand, the land battles are slow, plodding, boring and dull. It takes forever to move your people and machinery around. Once you've done that, it takes forever for them to overcome enemy positions or groups. Even once you've done THAT, you might get stuck spending several minutes knocking down a building. To make matters worse, you're limited on the amount of forces you can bring down to a planet, so the slowness can't really be alivated. Even on the game's fastest settings, the land battles are still an exercise in patience, or lack thereof.
The graphics and sound effects are fine, and the game runs smoothly enough. I like the planetary conquest setup, where you get more credits based on the number of planets you control. In fact the only thing I don't like about the game is the land battles. Since that's about half the game, you can see where we have a problem.
Great game & not your typical RTS July 21, 2008
This is a great game and extremely entertaining. I've played a lot of RTS (real-time strategy) games and unfortunately, most of them follow a very formulaic and unrealistic approach to combat - overwhelm your opponent by building a massive horde of cheap units (first instituted in StarCraft (the infamous "Zergling Rush")). Well, I'm pleased to say this game does not follow that model - expect massive hordes of weanies to be crushed (finally, a game where the static defenses actually do help to repel invaders). The game requires you to think and plan out your moves (if you can play a game of Axis & Allies, you can play this game quite easily). I enjoy games that aren't over in 15 minutes - when you play this game, expect to spend a good chunk of time playing it and have to think about strategic placement of forces and development of same.
The expansion pack adds in a new faction and you get everything in one box, so the Gold Pack is well worth it.
Bottom line: If you like deep strategy, you'll enjoy this game.
Fun, but hogs resources and gets repetitive June 10, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
It may matter that I'm a Star Wars Geek. Actually, I'm a polygeek. I geek out on all sorts of things, but I do like Star Wars quite a bit.
So this set of two games appealed greatly to me. The characters, planets, and actions all reflect fairly faithfully the expanded Star Wars universe, which I never got much into but it beats the Star Trek universe (Luke Skywalker never tried to hook up with a green alien with sucker-fingers, for instance).
What the game got most right from an RTS perspective is the comprehensiveness of spacefaring combat. You must defeat orbiting defenses before landing to assault planets. This is something that some games (the aged but respected Imperium Galactica II) got right, and others (the disappointing Master of Orion 3) got dead darned wrong. Every battle is, strangely, centered on a planet, rather than in midspace, and the planetary maps are pretty tiny, but the idea is there. If you want to conquer territory you need a space fleet and a sizeable landing party.
The coolest feature of the games is undoubtedly the "movie mode" where your camera view attempts to follow the action. When it gets it right, it's bloody cool. When it gets wrong (the camera is stuck behind an asteroid or somehow grabs the wrong section of space), it's a little lame.
However, the game gets a bit repetitive. There's unfortunately not a lot of strategy - overwhelming force is really what wins, especially since there are a lot of artificial limits on how many units you can bring on ground battles. I mean, c'mon, if I've got 11 platoons in my landing party, why only let me land 3 at a time? Command and Conquer is often dominated by the tank rush strategy (though the Generals games often sidesteps this through terrain and technology, forcing a technology-oriented solution), but there's no getting around it in Empires at War.
Space combat is entirely 2-D, which is really disappointing. Considering that Homeworld, Hegemonia, Imperium Galactica II and every space-based shooter since 1998 have successfully implemented 3-D battles, there's no excuse for a lack of a Z-axis. True, the ships kinda hover around the Z-axis on their own, but there's no surrounding your enemies in 3-space. You simply mass your forces, use their special abilities (some of which are lame) and hope to destroy them. That's it.
Dragging down the fun are the system resources required. The game says it'll run on an NVidia 3-series chip. I've got a 6-series on a very new dual-core HP 5600+ with 3 GB RAM, which I know means I'm a year behind on technology, but any more than a dozen units and the game DRAGS, especially in ground combat. I fault the game design here - I can run Generals:Zero Hour with 100+ units going at once with no slowdown or frame breakup, but for whatever reason, Empires at War just crawls.
And it has crashed twice to the dreaded BSD while playing. I've run every maintenance check and can find nothing wrong with my system. Maybe there's a patch I'm missing somewhere out there?
In conclusion, this is a fun game for die-hard Star Wars geeks, but RTS fans will want to look elsewhere.
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