Introduction

Star Wars Empire at War is the latest RTS game from Lucasarts. It breaks away from the standard RTS resource management, and is instead much more tactical in nature. It is set between the times of Episode 3 and Episode 4, so there will be a lot of missions that haven?t been in any of the movies or books, which is nice.

Graphics: 10/10

Wow. The graphics in this are incredible. In my opinion, they are better than the graphics in Age of Empire 3. When it is hot, there is a haze effect around the objects. The stormtroopers and other characters look very realistic. I don?t know what the water looks like, since there is none in the demo, but I can assume that the water will be equally good in the full version.

Gameplay 17/20

The gameplay is good, though different from the normal RTS. First of all, there is no resource management. Instead, you get credits for accomplishing mission objectives, and at the end of each day. You handle all of your army building in the space map. There you can build guys on your different planets, and move them to where you are planning on attacking. Once you get your army all together, you can attack. In a space battle, all of your men are in at once. You can pick different hardpoints to attack on the capital ships and space stations. When you attack something big like a Star Destroyer or a MC-80, you can use your bombers to take out their weapons so that your capital ships can finish them off. Land battles are interesting in that you can only land a small force at first. To land the rest of your forces, you have to capture some more landing zones. Land battles aren?t as much fun as space battles as far as I am concerned. All of the men in the game are very strong, and it is a pain to destroy other armies. Fortunately, the turrets are not overpowered. There are two types of turrets, one does a ton of damage to infantry, but almost none to vehicles. The other turret does the opposite. On land battles, you can also call in bomber strikes if you have bombers in orbit of the planet. There is also weather on land battles, like tornadoes. If one of them hits your infantry, they go flying all over the place. There are heroes in this, but they aren?t that much better than normal soldiers.

Sound 10/10

It is a Star Wars game, so the sound is incredible.

Stability 5/5

No problems here.

Controls 5/5

Typical RTS controls, so no problems here.

Appropriateness

It is an RTS game, so there is a lot of violence. However, there is no blood. No swearing either, unless you count the star wars swear words.

Conclusion

This is a fun RTS game that isn?t identical to all the other games out there. I would recommend getting the demo to see what you think of it. Appropriateness Overall Score = 47/50
RTS Violence (-3 pts} Gameplay overall score = 47/50

Overall score = 94%

{pgomakase}