This is pretty good fast paced RTS with some 4x elements mixed in. There isn't anything exeptionally deep in the game, but still it manages to be fun in proper use of Star Wars license and varying enough gameplay. Land battles are bit boring, but luckily you can auto resolve most of them (you can auto resolve space battles too). That does mean, however, that you lose more units than you would by battling it yourself. It's a fair trade off in my opinion, because land troops are relatively cheap and the time you save, is considerable. Where this game truly shines are the space battles. They are exiting and intense, since you only have the fleet you attack with. You cannot build any units during battle and what you go into battle with are what you have. The game does impose unit limits, so you cannot have 20 destroyers and support craft in battle at the same time. You can only have limited amount and when they get destroyed you can jump in reinforcements, if you have any. The same applies to land battles, but there you have to hold landing sites in order to land troops. Like I mentioned, the game is not very deep or hugely complex and ultimately the biggest army wins, but all units are strong vs. something (and also weak vs. something) and you can turn the tide with smaller force if you utilize your army correctly. BUT! The two star score comes from the really bad performance on modern operating systems. It lags and stutters and is practically unplayable. The Forces of Corruption add-on campaing seems to work fine, but the vanilla Empire at War does not. There are fixes you can try, but even though they helped me some, the game was still in pretty bad shape and I would not recommend getting this. Shame, because all in all this is one of the good Star Wars games out there that would stand on its own even without the Star Wars license.
The game itself is fantastic, but it does not work properly on modern systems (even this GoG version). I was able to launch the game, but I was not able to play it for long. Crashing, game runs too fast etc. I am using Win 8 64bit. There is a Launcher (look for it in the community section) that supposedly makes the game playable for some people, but not for me. If you really want to run it properly you will need Windows XP (or 98). You can install XP on a Virtual Machine and play the game like that, but it is still helluva hassle to get it to run. So do it only if you desperately want to play this game. It really is sad that GoG released a version of this game that does not work properly.
