Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds - Utterly Charming Take On RTS (Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds (PC))

Member Name: AndyCreighton

Product:	Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds (PC)
Date:	23/05/09 (8 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Its Star Wars, Faster Paced Than Age Of Empires

Disadvantages: The Online Side Of The Game Is Dead, Not As Much Star Wars As I Hoped

Around the time of its release, Lucasarts had quite a bad track record with regards to Star Wars based games, none of them really offered something never seen before. The bad news? Nor does Galactic Battlegrounds. Don't get me wrong, I loved the game, it really was an excellent game, but as far as a Star Wars fan was concerned it was mediocre at best.

The goal of the game was to basically collect resources, build and army and destroy the enemy. The basic outline of any RTS game. There was an element of story to the game through the campaign mode. You could play through the game as each of the available civilisations, Wookies, Gungans, Trade Federation, The Empire, Rebel Alliance & Naboo. Each had their own story which was unlinked to any of the films (except the Trade Federation story which had you take over Naboo). While the stories weren't that interesting they gave you some perspective as to why you were doing what your doing.

What's more, each civilisation had its own unique look, heros and units. Some had units available to them that others didn't , this was determined by an in game tech tree. Each civilisation also had at least 1 unique unit available to buy at the fortress. These were the only real different between civs, there were other bonus but the civilisations were near enough identical in every way but what is listed above. Why you may think this makes the game all too sameish, I have to disagree. I believe the fact that there wasn't much difference helped to balance the game, and not making one civ more powerful than another. Obviously some were better at different aspects of the game, but no one civ stood out among the rest as the dominant choice.

GBG was powered by the Age of Empires 2 engine, infact it plays almost identical. Some changes were needed, such as Power Cores to power your buildings as you obviously need electricity. One of the main changes I found was the increased amount of units that had ranged weapons. AoE2 had a majority of melee units making the wars into a bit of a mish mash. GBG on the other hand forces you to control your units strictly and micromanage them well in order to come out on top. Using ranged weapons makes teh game a lot faster paced and its easier and quicker to enter and leave battle as you will. This leads to a lot of strategic raids.

While there are several different game modes to play, the 2 dominant ones were Random Map and Death Match. In Random Map, you started with very little resources, a Command Center, 3 workers and were at the very bottom of the tech tree. It focused on resource collecting early on and huge battles later in the game. The Death Matches were a different story. You started with your Command Center and 3 workers, but this time you had a huge stockpile of resources, meaning that combat immediately was almost certain. The latter of the games were faster paced but quickly fell out of favour for Random Map.

GBG also comes with its own in game scenario builder, this allowed you to build your own missions and multiplayer games. By yourself it is not much fun, but games posted their missions on fansites available for download meaning you had practically endless supply of games.

What really helped GBG was the online play. You could play with a maximum of 8 players and have any combination of teams. Screenplays mentioned earlier had been turned into multiplayer games to be played with your friends over the net. Tournaments were popular during the beginning of the games life but started to fade away as people lost interest in the game. Eventually only the elite players set up their own tournaments excluding lesser players. The online game died due to a lack of support from Lucasart.

With all the above mentioned, while it is extremely dated looking today. Star Wars Galactic Battleground was a charming, fast paced Real Time Strategy game based in the world of Star Wars. I would recommend it to both RTS lovers and Star Wars fans. If you enjoyed Age of Empires, you will enjoy this.

Andy Creighton

Summary: Possibly A Better RTS Than Age Of Empires 2?