Good day.
When it comes to adapting franchises for video games, Star Wars has got to be one of the
best.
Why?
Because to portray the "star wars", you can show it from many different perspectives and
thus use it for many different genres.
Like the FPS genre; you can show the war from the ground.
Or the flight sim genre and you can show it from space as an X-wing pilot trying to destroy
a capital ship.
Or you can show it from the RTS standpoint.
Because let's face it, a real war requires strategy.
It requires planning and it requires intelligence other than just shooting things in front of
you.
Here we have Star Wars: Empire at War.
This is one of many Star Wars RTS's and as far as I know, the latest one to be released.
Now as you can see, in this game you can play both on the land and in space.
And both actually are played more or less identically.
Now there are three different game modes.
There is the campaign, where it follows the story showing the rise of the Rebellion!
And then there is Galactic Conquest, where you can play as either the Rebellion or the
Empire.
You can try to free the galaxy as the Rebellion or try to conquer it as the Empire!
Now basically, this is probably the most fun mode in the game.
Essentially, you actually conquer the galaxy in a fairly realistic way.
Each planet that you could control has to have certain number of buildings that you
then use to produce the units that you want.
You have to have an upgraded starbase to of course produce the higher level ships.
You have to upgrade the ground facilities to produce higher level ground units.
And you have to use both space and ground units to conquer plants.
Before you can conquer any world you must of course defeat their space fleet, but that
doesn't mean you win the world!
Instead, you have to land on the planet and conquer it on the ground.
And of course, once you conquer the planet, you can have more credits, have more buildings
and things of that nature.
It's a highly dynamic mode of play and is quite enjoyable to say the least.
And then finally you just have the generic Skirmish maps where you can either play in
space or ground.
The multiplayer for the game is fairly good.
You can do Galactic Conquest competitively and you can do just Skirmish maps.
The graphics for Empire at War are really quite good.
They of course have aged a bit in the intervening years, but for the time, they looked pretty
damn impressive.
One of the best aspects of this game, though, when it comes to graphics, is the fact that
you can toggle a cinematic cameras.
That way you don't have to look at it from a God's eye perspective but instead go right
into the action.
And damn, is it entertaining to watch.
In the end, I am actually a pretty big fan of Star Wars: Empire at War.
In fact, this was the RTS that actually got me into RTS games.
And is one that I cannot recommend enough.
And so, this is Jon, signing off.