- Star Wars: Empire at War puts the power to command an entire war for the Star Wars galaxy in the hands of players, giving them the freedom to determine how they play the game within the completely scalable and accessible gameplay. Set a few years before the events of Episode IV A New Hope, LucasArts new PC game lets players wage war on ground and in space, as well as experience the creation of the
Product Description
Star Wars: Empire at War Gold Pack PC… More >>
Star Wars Empire At War Gold Pack
I like Star Wars as well as your average 30-something red-blooded American male, but I am by no means a fanboy; in fact, I have found that most Star Wars related games in the past decade are kind of ‘meh’. With that said, I loved the original Empires at War, it was a great game that combined a strategic game of planet conquering with two types of RTS games in which you fought for control of planets on land and in space – it didn’t rest on the Star Wars Franchise to please the user, the Star Wars heroes, vehicles, and troops are just an added bonus. User created mods are freely available on the net, and that expands replayability immensely. I pulled it off the shelf the other day to find some of the new mods use the expansion – the original expansion no longer seems to be available from Amazon, but the gold package has both the original and expansion. The original was a great twist on the basic RTS style of game, and one of my favorites, gameplay-wise. Eye candy isn’t as good as more modern titles, but gameplay has held up well. IMHO, the original game is still worth the price, and I’m sure the expansion just sweetens the pot.
Note that their cover art for this product is for the original game, not the gold edition; I was waffling on whether to buy it until I saw the customer pic, as it didn’t seem the gold edition had the expansion and there is no mention of it in the product description. Per Lucasart’s website, the gold edition does indeed have the Forces of Corruption expansion included (and looks like the second picture in the gallery). Thanks to ‘JJAV’ for the clarifying customer pic.
Rating: 5 / 5
Positive Side: This is a very good value. For two games you get them for only $30. I remember the time it was out, it was $39.99 in Bestbuy for only the non-expansion game. This one is a deal although it is a bit old now. Still, it’s very fun. There’s more to it in the game. If you search on Google for Game Modifications, you can download a few you like and add features and new units to the game for free. In fact, some game modders go all the way to the extent of modifying the whole game. (Note: Many games are also modded.) Very nice, and very fun in multi-player. The game can run at high settings perfectly on my desktop and notebook PC. (My computer can barely run Crysis on medium settings on my desktop (Intel Quad Core Processor, NVIDIA 512 MB GeForce 8600GT) and almost not playable on my notebook PC except on low settings (2.2 GHz NIVIDA 256 MB 8600m GS)).
Negative Side: The land battles tend to get a bit boring since they are similar to other strategy-based games (but the heroes were fun to play with). Also the computer tends to be relaxed and not attack you unless it’s part of the storyline. This is not really a challenge although you can search around for MODs that make it harder. The graphics are not the best but at least they do not stress a computer like Crysis.
Overall, the game is best for its space battles. Go to Youtube to see some of it.
Rating: 4 / 5
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.
Rating: 3 / 5
My 9 y/old son played Empire at War at his cousin’s house over Christmas and begged me to buy it for him when he got home. We found it on here for $20 but when the local Best Buy had it for the same price we bought it from there instead.
We got home and installed the game and Empire at War ran just fine, but the boy wanted to play the Forces of Corruption, as that was what he’d played at his cousin’s house, so we hit Play on the Launcher and…his screen went black, and stayed black.
Fortunately his system didn’t actually lock up so we were able to Alt-Tab back to his desktop where we found an Exception! Error box that told us pretty much nothing at all, other than that something had gone wrong.
I found a patch on LucasArts’ website but when I attempted to run this patch it claimed FoC was not installed. I even copied the Patch’s EXE file into the default FoC folder and ran it, and it still insisted it couldn’t find the game. This was with the game installed in the default folder, and yet the official patch from LucasArts themselves claimed the game was not installed.
I reinstalled FoC and tried to run it again, with the same problem. I tried to apply the patch and again saw “FoC is not installed”. We installed both the game & the xpac on my PC and they ran just fine, but then I have XP, so while my boy played on my PC I spent most of the evening on his PC looking online for a fix.
I discovered that not only was I NOT the only person with this problem, but it was a very well known problem with trying to play FoC on a Vista system with more than 3GB of RAM. I found various workarounds, none of which worked for us, until I found a fix that led to me going into the MSConfig file and telling Vista to only load 3 of 4GB of RAM. I rebooted my son’s PC, fired up FoC, and whadda ya know! It worked!
4GB of RAM is practically the industry standard for a low end system today, so it’s ridiculous that I have to either remove or disable 25% of my son’s RAM in order to get this game running. It’s even more ridiculous that the original game runs just fine when Vista has 4GB of RAM loaded, but the expansion? It refuses to run under Vista with more than 3GB of RAM.
My son loves this game, but if you have Vista and more than 3GB of RAM in your system, be prepared for some trouble shooting.
Rating: 3 / 5
This is a very enjoyable and very unique PC RTS. I have had a lot of fun playing it, though the galactic conquest mode can take weeks if not months to win. The levels and environments are really cool, and the gameplay is enhanced by the ability to use jedis and other cool heros. In conclusion, this is a must-have, for its smooth graphics and minimal glitches.
Rating: 4 / 5