Star Wars: Empires at War
Anyone else grabbed the demo? I was excited about this game, then got the demo. Now I'm not so excited.
Anyway, the demo is extremely limited. This is what I came away with:
The Good:
The galactic strategic game looks pretty cool. You can build only a certain number of installation on planets, so you have to pick and choose between military, defense, research, and economic type structures. IMO, that's quite cool. It's more in depth than I thought it would be. Throw into that trade routes increasing hte neat cash gain of all connected systems, and interrupting the opponents trade routes actually becomes a viable strategy. How cool is that!
The bad:
the combat. The combat is like standard RTS stuff. Minus the base building (I think, for the most part). The maps are pretty small, and it looks like they're static. IE, every time you fight for control of tatooine, it's the same map. Maybe the full game is a bit more varied, but definetely the maps are hand crafted, limited in number, and not massively huge, randomly generated, planetary level affairs like they should be. Space combat is the same.rr
So...the tactical combat looks gay. The space combat is hard to control....maybe I'm just not good at it yet, but selecting your fighters seems to be hard to do, since they move so quick.
Also, everything's scale is off....but, with it being small RTS maps, I guess that's unavoidable.
So...I'm not so excited any more. I'll still probably get it, and I think the strategic portion will still rock. The RTS part will probably suck. But hey, more star wars games suck, so I guess getting it half right is better than usual. Of course, I could be wrong, and the whole thing will pwn, but I really, REALLY doubt it.