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Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds

Score: 8.7/10

The words most often associated with Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds (GB) are “Age of Empires” and “Age of Kings.”  Supposedly, AoE and AoK are excellent games in their own right, but as I played neither – I can’t play all the games – I’m coming in with a different perspective.  All the other reviews I’ve read continually harp on the comparisons with AoE and AoK – hell, even the manual tells you up front that players familiar with AoE will feel right at home, but you won’t find copious references to those games here.  You’ll just get an honest evaluation of GB.  

I started with the tutorial campaign.  Qui-Gon Jinn guides you through practically everything you need to know as you help Chewbacca’s father, Anti-chuck-chuck (that what it sounds like), set up camp on Alaris Prime.  The tutorial starts at ground zero, basically treating you like a moron with Qui-Gon’s condescending tone.  The basics come slow, then the advanced features fly by in rapid succession or he tells you four ways to do one thing.  It’s an uneven experience but at the end of it you should know how to build, explore, attack, defend, garrison, research upgrades, etc. (The manual is complete, so if the tutorial leaves you scratching your head it can always be turned to.)

Besides the tutorial campaign there are 5 other campaigns including Darth Vader’s actions after the Battle of Yavin and Boss Nass’s fight with the Trade Federation.  The campaigns allow you to play six different factions: the Gungans, the Naboo, the Imperials, the Rebel Alliance, Trade Federation, and Wookies.  Each campaign affords enough challenge and they can be attempted in any order, so if you do get frustrated with one you can move onto another.  Or you can forget about them altogether and jump to the online battles or play random scenarios, which allow 

 

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you to not only practice but also make some interesting battle combinations.  Just how would Imperial Stormtroopers fare against an onslaught of Gungans?  It will put Star Wars purists into a tizzy!  I actually witnessed a couple of players arguing over whether the cross-trilogy match-ups should have even been allowed.  (These are the same two guys that argued about the effectiveness of the Death Star against a Borg Cube.)

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GB goes about trying to perfect micromanagement.  There are oodles of things to keep in mind and keep track of.  Three-quarters of almost all scenarios are spent managing your army of workers – collecting nova crystals, carbon, food, and ore, building necessary structures, repairing damaged buildings, and making sure they don’t go too far afield or stand idle for long.  Everything can get bogged down really quick if you try to keep your workers doing things efficiently.  Fortunately, if done correctly, only an initial setup is required (then minor adjustments) since the workers are fairly automated.  Build an ore processor close to where they are harvesting ore, and so on.  It pays off later as you swing your efforts to the military side of things.

Just about every military unit seen (and unseen) in the movies are present including AT-AT walkers, tauntauns, X-wings, Dark Troopers, and Destroyer Droids.  Amass enough troops and hardware and you can crush practically anyone.  Of course, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.  Building walls around your base actually works to protect you.  In other real-time strategy games, like Red Alert 2, I never built walls.  What’s the point when two tanks can blast tough them in a couple of shots?  In GB they actually make a difference – they slow the enemy down long enough for you to create more troops and fight back.  The flaw of course is that shooting through a wall like it wasn’t there also happens.  Strategy and tactical strikes are very effective but creating a massive strike force stills turns up victory more often than not.  Most of the RTS conventions are present as well: queuing unit production, way points, troop transports, building and unit upgrades, unit grouping, and Hero units.  Forgetting to upgrade units and do research is easy to do – just get into the habit of clicking on various buildings to see what’s available.  GB comes with a huge foldout tech tree poster.  This should be close at hand because if you try to remember the tech trees, you’ll just get confused. (Okay, I got confused.)  The other aspect that really got to me was that everything – every action, building, upgrade, etc. – has a hotkey.  If you hope to manage everything as efficiently as possible you’ll have to learn at least a few of them.  Managing the controls exclusively with the mouse can be done, but in tense multiplayer knowing some keyboard shortcuts really helps.

Graphics are good and run smoothly even on current low-end computers.  Not all the units are to scale – but big deal!  There’s a lot of color in everything going on and many of the locations are instantly recognizable.  Dagobah, Hoth, Endor – all your favorites are included. (We even get to see what the hell a Gundark is and just how bad it would be to actually be a Nerf herder.)  Plus, at the end of each campaign an “historical” scenario is unlocked.  (My favorite is the Battle of Hoth.)  I didn’t experience any choppy performance – even load times are kept to a minimum.  Perfectly matched to this is the music and sound effects.  The original actors don’t supply voice-over work but what is there is good.  And you just can’t beat John Williams’ score.  

Multiplayer is a lot of fun.  Through Zone.com you can meet up and battle for dominance of the galaxy.  Although I had much fun just fighting against the computer AI, which is pretty good (and has three difficulty settings), nothing satisfies quite like dropping the hammer on a human opponent.  Play over the Internet was good, but it’s still prone to the usual pitfalls of dropped connections, etc.

The included editor should extend the shelf life GB for some time to come.

At the end of the day, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds is worth your money. People that like to avoid micromanagement might think twice, but for those that take the plunge, they’ll find some great Star Wars action – official timeline be damned! – and a good game.  It’s got everything you want in an RTS, established RTS conventions, a random map generator, multiplayer, some great campaigns, and a map editor all with ease of use and fun in mind.

- Omni

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