My love/hate relationship with Empire At War

I love Star Wars, it aside from books and gaming was one of the first things I geeked out on as a kid during the time they were digitally remastering the Original Trilogy in the cinemas. I sort of blame my father for taking me to see A New Hope for my 8th birthday a long time ago.

And I've supported my own love for the movies by buying a few games made by the once proud now sadly mediorce LucasArts. To be fair, I blame LA a lot for the decline of quality Star Wars games for becoming caught up in the marketing whoreage and hype of the silly bloody prequal movies. Between 2000 and 2005, an army of shoddily done games based on Jedi or the Clone Wars swept out from the HQ of LA and slapped limply against many different console formats and the PC. Many of us loyal fans saw these titles, wept and remembered fondly of X-Wing Versus TIE Fighter, Rogue Squadron or Jedi Knight II.

Knights Of The Old Republic and the slightly buggy sequal have been the ONLY hits in these last couple of years.

One of the biggest Star Wars Gaming mistakes was Star Wars Galaxies, as you have already heard from me. Another brillaint but slightly blundered title is Empire At War, a RTS set during the original trilogy of the Galactic Civil War era of Star Wars. Now, Empire At War doesn't suck. It can be quite entertaining, but there are certain bits made of fail that SHOULD have been fine tuned a little more by the game developers, or scrapped and remade immediatly. Sadly, EaW was part of the last minute marketing for Revenge of The Sith along side the dismal Battlefront 2 and ROTS game. Bugger.

Read on and discover the nitpicks:

Space doesn't work that way!:

Empire at Wars main selling point was suppose to be the epic space battles between the two factions, and for sure these battles can be visually impressive as possible. In the game, named ships can impressively barrage and with detail cause massive chunks of debris to be blown off each other. However, space is oddly strange. Why? BECAUSE SPACE IS GODDAMN LAND BATTLES WITH SPACE SKINS. For some silly, insane and cheap reason LA decided that space didn't need fancy physics like the options for ships to move up or down or have space look and feel like space. Extra annoyingly, they put a frigging grid underneath to remind us we're playing a reskinned land battle with different units. Also, space sometimes can visually be impressive but every battle it is just you, a few tiny Asteroid fields and some odd crappy Nebula randomy littered around. Ugh. Fail. Also, tactics are yawningly simple. Attack the shield generator/hanger hard points then dominate with numbers.

Lack Luster Land Battles:

Land Battles in EaW can sometimes be a pain in the ass. If you are the attacking or defending forces. To win/lose a Land Battle you really just need to have superior numbers attacking or defending. Just get/save the shield Generator, then swamp all the defence points with your units. If you or the enemy have a hero, they must be the first thing over whelmed. Fighting against the Native Units is also equally annoying at times for both sides, since Native Militia are about as useful as an ice cream in the Sahara Desert. The maps too are sometimes too small or the same for some planets. At least, visual wise they don't suck that much.

Awkward Unit Animations:

Land Battle Units seem to walk and act painfully sloooooow, even when they die and about that, using the same death animation where they fall down slowly at the same time is really cheap LA. Couldn't even afford to knock up some crude ragdoll physics at least for the Infantry? for shame. All I can say is, a times thank god there is a button that speeds combat up. Units visually, are alright thankfully unless you have an awful graphics card.

Balance with the factions:

Ah, Balance. A curse on all Star Wars games. The Rebel Alliance traditionally is suppose to be the under equipped old tech using much smaller underdog of the SW Universes but because gaming has to be fair for both sides these days, certain liberties with canon sadly have to be made. That means new units and tech pulled out from nowhere, instead of being edapted from the EU or other movies. Amusingly enough, they do this for the Expansion with the Criminal Tyber Zahn faction but in vanilla EaW prepare to see a few new things like the Tartan Patrol Cruiser, Space Rocket Launchers and that fucking unholy Rebel Artillery unit. At least in space, the Rebels and Empire have the proper advantages. While the Empires Star Destroyers can deal a bitching amount of damage, the Alliance have heavy shielding and fighters not made out of cardboard.

Slow AI:

The AI, unless you are playing on Hard is insanely slow and easy going. They rarely mount a attack on your forces on the reason that they usually pool all their ships into a single fleet and more or less jump randomly from planet to planet. In space or land defence, they can easily be overwhelmed in numbers. The AI cannot be blamed though, since in space or land tactical choices are pretty limited to spamming with numbers or abilities.


So why do I install and play these games? For the feel. Despite game wise, they can be poor at times EaW has the atmosphere that appeals to all Star Wars fans. The music, the symbolic clips from the films, the battlefield on the planets looks and the fact you get to control Darth Vader or the Emperor on a one man slaughter fest. Damn LA for being cheap and simply appealing to the fanboys in us all.

At least, EaW was a very good modding community that unlocks hidden content, improves units stats or animations or simply reinvents the game in total to something a hundred times better than the original vanilla games. Mods like Steiners Mod, or Phoenix Rising for example. So in the final word, EaW is okay, but get it when you know a series of good mods have been released. It would be so worth it to play EaW with a Mod than the sadly slow and dull vanilla version.