Star Wars: Empire At War Demo

I’m on a bit of a Star Wars kick this afternoon. Seeing as Star Wars: Empire at War (warning: horrible flash-based site) is out next week I thought I’d play through the demo to check it out.

First impression: The demo is a whopping 741MB! Bit of a hefty download.

Second: Wow that super-American voice-over guy must be loaded! The tutorial voice-over really reminds me of those awful voice-overs on terrible US “comedies” that all sounds like they’re voiced by the same guy – think of that South Park episode where “Rob Schneider is…. A Carrot!” (Season 6, Episode 15) Yeah, it’s that kind of voice.

Third: It’s actually quite a fun game if you’re into real-time strategy. Sort of a hybrid of Civilization empire-building and real-time strategy battlefield-conquering. You build your space units on your planets, fly them to neighbouring enemy planets as you would in Civilization, have a space battle if you’re lucky, then send your ground troops in and have a ground battle like your typical real-time strategy. Not sure about the other levels of the game but in the demo level there was no resource mining which I can only say is a good thing. There are also some espionage units like Smugglers (Han and Chewie) that fly into enemy planets and siphon off some cash and a few other tricks but the demo didn’t go into any detail.

Fourth: There’s a cinematic camera mode that looks awesome! It’s really easy to switch in and out of when you need take to control the battle as well. Check out the screenshots below.

Finally: The voice acting is really good (and an imperial officer has a Mr. Burns “Eh-xcellent” moment ;) ).

I would actually consider buy this when it comes out but I’m saving up for Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Sorry Lucasarts!

Screenshots:

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