Even back in the day, you’d hear a lot about game engines being licensed out to other companies in the first-person shooter sphere. Like the various iterations of the Unreal and Quake engines, built for in-house games and sold out to third parties (resulting in some truly fantastic games). But RTS engines? Sure, you’d get places like Westwood and Blizzard continuously iterating on their own tech, but they never offered it to somebody else to make their own games with. Even my beloved Atrox is, so far as I can tell, a very close clone of Starcraft but not actually built off it.

There was, however, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. The game where they resprayed Age of Empires II into everyone’s favourite space fantasy. Once again, a game which I did not play at the time but surely should have…

Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds

The civilisations you can play as are distinct in their visuals but symmetrical in their reality. Every building and unit has a unique appearance but an identical cost and function. Wookiee troops are bowcasters, the Trade Federation get Battle Droids, and so on. Factions only truly vary with what research technologies they can access and a few minor bonuses, plus their Unique Unit. (The Empire gets Dark Troopers!)

Yes, you even collect the same four resources as before: wood carbon, food, gold nova crystals and stone ore. Carbon and food are your basic resources required for simple troopers, gathered from chopping trees and foraging/hunting/farming. Nova crystals must be spent on fancy technology and vehicles and are mined from beautiful greeny-yellow crystal spires, leaving purple ore outcrops primarily for defensive emplacements.

This is where it starts to get weird. The Trade Federation forces are entirely robotic, and yet, they still cost food. Their workers are droids. Their troopers are Battle Droids. Their vehicles are tanks driven by… more Battle Droids. Their unique unit is the Destroyer Droid. It’s droids all the way down.

The one concession to all this automation is that the Trade Federation don’t need to build houses for their droids… But they do still need to forage from bushes, to build farms and fishing boats — which just feels bizarre. Who’s eating this stuff?! (Yes, sure, the Neimoidian masters, but they don’t appear on the field of battle and so are barely relevant.)

Mind you, there is a cute addition to the food gathering roster: although you can slaughter sheep nerfs to harvest their meat directly, they can also be garrissoned into an Animal Nursery building to generate passive food forever. I always felt bad killing the friendly sheep so this is a welcome addition. (Not that I’m a vegetarian in the real world.)

And then you get into each faction’s “mounted unit”. Sure, Wookiees having troops that ride kell dragons makes perfect sense, and the Gungans are seen on kaadus in The Phantom Menace… but Battle Droids riding beetles with flamethrowers? Meanwhile, the Trade Federation’s AAT, an all-rounder workhorse tank in the film, is relegated to being the anti-vehicle vehicle (albeit with the fun ability to garrisson a single unit).

Other fun quirks include the Gungans’ so-called “mech” units being animals with guns strapped to them, but despite appearing as organic units the medic cannot heal them. And why is my Gungan pummel, a rhino-headed creature that smashes its face into buildings, benefiting from research into “reinforced struts”?!

It feels to me like factions in the Star Wars universe just aren’t even, so choosing to build Galactic Battlegrounds off Age of Empires II‘s very symmetrical civilisation setup might well have been a fundamental misstep. Something more like Command & Conquer, where the factions start broadly similar but vary more and more the further you advance, would surely have suited the theme better.

There are some other peculiar choices that make life a lot more awkward than it needs to be.

Of course since this is a world of blaster rifles, the majority of your troops have ranged attacks rather than melee attacks. Ranged attackers have minimum ranges, so if their targets get too close, they’ll walk away. This works well enough in AoE2, where your archers are most likely behind a wall of swordsmen anyway — while the front lines melt together, the ranged units provide backup. Here, though, where the whole army is ranged, the front lines rarely melt together, and those stodgy crescents start to form instead. And units that can only attack air obviously just get in the fucking way. And then you have to chase that one last enemy across half the map as it keeps retreating from you.

Han shot Greedo at point-blank range. Why couldn’t they just disable the minimum range requirement? (Dare I say it? If it works for Starcraft…)

The campaigns are about as movie tie-in as you’d expect. The Trade Federation get to invade and occupy Naboo, from the perspective of a commander Battle Droid. The Gungans get a… history lesson from Boss Nass, who recounts the tale of an ancestor who united the warring Gungan tribes in a manner much like that Ghengis Khan mission (but on a smaller scale), before resisting the Trade Federation on Naboo in the present day. Darth Vader takes on the rebels in the period between the destruction of the first Death Star above Yavin IV and the battle on Hoth.

They unfortunately repeat many of the mistakes of the original Age of Empires II campaigns. Population caps are so ungenerous that you can’t build up decent armies. Tech levels are so limited that you have to break down fortifications ever-so-slowly with potato siege equipment. Resources are annoyingly scarce. Enemies are so firmly entrenched that breaking through under those limitations is a slog rather than a strategic delight.

The adherence to AoE2‘s bones is slavish to the point where, yes, it feels more like a total conversion mod assembled by eager fans than a proper game. A lot of those slavish adherences come to the detriment of the theme, and sometimes they’ve just plain forgotten to change something (e.g. the tooltip for Jedi/Sith conversion starts off saying Force Power but quickly reverts to Faith). It’s just a little bit sloppy, which stands in stark contrast to the timelessly exquisite craft of its progenitor.

I would also add that, on the scale of “feels like Star Wars“, it frequently… actually doesn’t. Yes, all of the iconic soldiers and vehicles are present, as are most of those inimitable pew pew blaster sounds… but a lot of the buildings and even some of the vehicles just don’t look like they quite fit, and the sound effects draw a little too much from the Sound Ideas General 6000 instead of Ben Burtt’s archives.

Star Wars has enough big screen battles that turning it into an RTS should have been an easy win, but I can’t lie: Galactic Battlegrounds just doesn’t hit the spot. Mind you, with the Rebel and Wookiee campaigns remaining, plus the expansion pack’s Clone Campaigns, and the prospect of a few maximum power skirmishes… there’s still hope.