Yes, SWGB is a very close adaptation of the Age of Empires 2 engine. So much so that, on the first few times played, it feels like AoE2 with Star Wars skins on the units. Heck, I even snickered at it during the first play. Wookiees piloting tanks? Give me a break. And yet…

…within a week, I was telling my girlfriend that I had to go play with my Wookiee (a phrase she for some reason finds funny) and disappearing for hours at a time. Is it a tribute to the AoE2 engine or the way the Star Wars mythos envelops and excites? Probably both — Microsoft’s strategy series is eminently playable, and I love marching forces into battle to the Imperial March.

Gameplay is much like the engine SWGB is built upon. The player starts with a basic "village" (in this case, a command center with some prefab shelters) and a few workers (generally droids). Workers are sent to collect resources (carbon, ore and nova crystals replace AoE’s wood, stone and gold), which are used to build military buildings and units, which are in turn used to bash the bantha dung out of all opponents.

In free-play mode, the player can choose from a variety of races (Wookiee, Gungan, Rebel, Empire, Naboo and Trade Federation) and a nice range of planets. The game even includes custom maps for some of the movies’ more notorious settings (Hoth, Tatooine, et al.) as well as a few that must come from the novels or other games. I sure didn’t recognize ‘em.

Free-play is often interesting in that it’s fun to pit the Rebels against the Wookiees or some such situation. Sure, you can set up teams that reflect the movies, but it’s nice to concoct some "What if?" alliances. On a side note, I predict most players will choose the Gungans (of which Jar-Jar Binks is a member) as the opponent, if only for revenge on the series’ most-hated character.

To LucasArts’ credit, the campaign scenarios are nicely varied and don’t seem forced into the Star Wars universe. They begin with a tutorial hosted by Jedi knight Qui-Gon Jinn. After that, you can jump right into stories featuring the early days of the Gungans; the Trade Federation’s takeover of Naboo; Han and Chewie’s liberation of the latter’s home world; Darth Vader’s march for domination; and Princess Leia’s attempts to rejoin the rebellion after a crash landing while helping some Bothan spies. Each has its own difficulty level, but most (except the tutorial) are challenging even to AoE vets like myself.

So, the flaws. For one thing, most units are generic across the races. Each race does have unique units toward the end of the tech tree, plus some unique powers (Wookiee ingenuity, for example, which increases repair abilities), but for the most part every single unit has a twin on the other side. The game really shines with its depiction of Jedi and Sith. At first, these seem to be reskinned versions of AoE’s monk character, but as the player advances in tech levels they gain some really neat powers.

My beef here is that it’s hard to take full advantage of said powers in the heat of battle. Also, it’s too easy to build an army of the Jedi and Sith units, when Star Wars tradition holds that they be limited be just one or two really bad muthas who can carve through enemy troops. Instead, I at one point encountered a miniature army of enemy Jedi trainees, as if they could be cranked out as easily as troopers.

And not to beat a dead horse, but a lot of the game really does just play like AoE2 with a facelift. It takes while to get into the richer Star Wars-inspired material, and by that time most casual gamers will have given up and moved on.

The soundtrack is incredible, of course, but it’s John Williams’ standard score, so what do you expect?

Hardcore Star Wars fans will want this one, of course, and other strategy fans should definitely give it a try. But I suspect it’ll act merely as a placeholder until the next installment of the Jedi Knight shooter series comes out. That’s a shame; this is a good, if flawed, game.