Star Wars: Forces at War

After seeing Rogue One I got pumped for Star Wars. There was a Steam sale on a huge pack of old Star Wars games. One was already on my wishlist and about ten of the games looked playable so I got it.

So far I've played the Rebel campaign and I've started the Forces of Corruption expansion.

Summary

Worth it for the nostalgia. For a non-fan, I would not recommend.

The Good

Fairly immersive Star Wars RTS experience. You get some extra backstory on Han and Chewbacca. You get to see various races defending their homeworld. You get to blow up the Death Star. In my game, the Death Star destroyed five planets before I could take it down.

While the graphics are largely outdated, the models are pretty great. It's fun to pop into theater mode and watch the battle play itself out. 

I'm especially enjoying Forces of Corruption because I'm interested in the lore behind Tyber Zann. If the Zann Consortium wasn't the focus of the game I might not be playing it.

The Mediocre

The gameplay isn't great. There are three arena.

Most of the building happens on the galaxy map. The decisions might be interesting in tense PvP match, but weren't in the campaign. If a system is near the front line you might build planetary defenses, but probably won't. 

On the system map you can see massive fleet battles. This is pretty satisfying. Dealing with reinforcements isn't as fiddly as planetary battles. However, I never felt much in control of the tactical combat. In some ways this is a good thing.. I prefer when an RTS gives the individual units some intelligence. An X-Wing should know to prioritize a TIE Bomber over an Imperial Corvette. You still need to give orders to concentrate fire, and this is where many RTS's fail. In Forces at War a unit can only belong to one hotkey group. So my bombers can belong to the "bomber" group or the"attack large ship" group, but not both.  In the end, I mostly just used two groups, an "X-Wing" group to attack fighters and an "everything else" to attack capital ships. Because of this, I didn't build many corvettes for fighter defense. It's like playing rock, paper, scissors but never using paper because you think it's dumb that paper beats rock. 

The planetary map lets you capture planets. There are some cool ideas here but the gameplay isn't as polished as Starcraft 2. 

The Bad

The galaxy map passes too quickly. It might take 10 seconds to move ship from one side of the map to the other. The UI for organizing fleets isn't great so even if you see an attack coming from a long way off, you might not be able to separate your defenseless transports from your mighty fleet. It is odd that the strategic map feels requires fast reflexes to respond to a threat.

The AI (on medium) does not handle static defenses like starbases very well. Starbases have a small defense squadron and when one unit of the squadron is destroyed it gets regenerated. The AI would continuously destroy my units and never focus on the building generating the units. This isn't just me exploiting the AI, the same would happen if I hit the fast-forward button and let the battle play itself out. The AI would win, however, if I used auto-resolve. 

The voice acting in Forces at War was fine, but in Forces of Corruption it is often bad.