1UP Preview

[GRYkudzA]

After mad "Demo-day" 1UP present little impression-preview:

 

Just seeing Star Wars in the title of game gets you curious because you never know whether you're going to get a KOTOR or a Masters of Teras Kasi. After all the positive reactions from those who've seen it, Star Wars Empire at War has both movie and RTS fans anxious for a chance to see for themselves. That day has arrived with today's release of the demo.

 

At over 700MB it will take you a couple minutes to grab, but it's worth waiting for. We've had a couple days to play around with it already and have a good feeling you're going to like what you see, but wish that there was more. The demo has two key pieces to it. The first is a series of tutorials that familiarize you with the different phases of the game. In a style more accustomed to turn-based games, managing your forces goes on at different levels. In the big picture (on the galactic map) you have to manage your planets, their resource and production contributions to the war effort and your fleets.

 

Two of the tutorials give you a pretty good introduction to how it all comes together. The game is not intended to be resource heavy. For the most part the production system is abstracted into a simple matter of he who controls the most planets wins. Each planet contributes credits to your bank, and provides a place to build ground and space facilities for your empire. There are a couple of wrinkles between playing as the Rebels or the Empire. As the Rebels for instance you can siphon credits from Imperial planets and you must steal technologies to advance. But by the end of the walkthrough you'll have the basics down.

 

The other three tutorial pieces go over waging war in space and on planets. Moving, attacking and the basics all work in familiar ways. What you'll want to pay attention to is the reinforcement system. Because production takes place during the galactic phase of the game, whatever forces you bring to a fight is the full extent of what you'll have. Furthermore, you can't bring them all to bear at once. Both in space and on the surface you'll bring units in throughout the battle. Planning which pieces to bring in when and where presents a new sort of strategy problem to figure out.

 

And you'll get at least a primer on how it all comes together in the other part of the demo. Its single-player demo campaign lets you tinker with all the pieces, but stops short of giving you the full experience of it all coming together. You play as the Rebels, tasked with freeing Tatooine from the Empire. Your first task will be to get your economy and forces together to even be able to move against them. As you're putting it together, keep in the back of your mind that the first battle will be in space.

 

That fight pits you against an empire fleet in the Vergesso Asteroids. It's not a huge battle, but you will need to utilize a range of capabilities in order to defeat them. Once you have that leg secured you'll be able to move on to Tatooine. Unlike what you'll probably see in the full game, there's no fleet in orbit protecting the planet. So, you head directly to the ground invasion. This final battle in the demo makes a good climax. Without spoiling the fun, you should be ready to hit the ground running. The Empire wastes no time before responding to your incursion and it does a good job of hitting you in multiple places at once.

 

But, the best way to find out is to see for yourself. We've got some brand new screens directly from the demo on the media page. And, if you haven't already, head over to the Star Wars Empire at War downloads page to grab it now.

 

Source: EaW.org