While it’s cool to see little civilians with blasters come to your aid in battle, such connections to the larger war effort are few and far between. The clunky controls don’t change with the planet’s climate, whether or not the population will aid you in battle, or how many bodies of water are present on the surface. The problem is they all fundamentally play the same. In an attempt to provide variety in the battlefield, the different planets have various structures, indigenous animals, and pads that can be captured.

You might as well leave the rest of your toys at home, because you’ll pretty much just spend every battle micromanaging your hero units. They can slice through troops, crush vehicles, or shake down enemy structures. They’re so overpowered that they can effectively wipe out an enemy army by themselves. The only exception is the hero units like Darth Vader.

Effectively the sci-fi world of Star Wars is reduced to Revolutionary War tactics. They can’t dig in, get morale boosts, construct new buildings, change their formation, or perform any of the myriad of tasks we associate with modern real time strategy games.Įvery battle plays out the same: both sides get close to the other and shoot. Your units can move, attack, capture strategic pads, and use their special ability. You need a scalpel to finally tune your troop formations but instead are given a bludgeon and a blindfold. If the land battles were a stand-alone Star Wars game (a la Battlegrounds) it would be the worst sci-fi RTS this side of Endor. The land battles were auto-resolved and the game played out more like a turn-based card game than a truly interactive experience. Heavily criticized, the only “action” part of the game was the space battles. Star Wars: Rebellion ambitiously attempted to depict everything from diplomacy to espionage to fleet formations in the Star Wars universe. Allowing you to take command of either the Rebel Alliance or the Galactic Empire, Empire at War is an epic strategy game with both real-time and turn-based tactical elements, enabling you to build and manage troops, ships, and hero characters as you lead your armies to conquer the galaxy. Now, games like Empire at War let you control a war effort across the entire galaxy. Initially, Star Wars games were limited to pixilated lightsabers or re-enactments of specific battles. Regardless of your opinion of the Star Wars movies, the continued popularity of the games prove that people want to explore and be a part of the universe George Lucas created. Game developers have been cashing in the Star Wars name for decades.

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