The game Fut 15 Coins ships with a story mode campaign for the Rebellion and the Empire, as well as a handful of "galactic conquest" scenarios. These play out quite similarly to the story campaigns, except with varying numbers of planets available, as well as variation in the technology level. The objectives don't change up that much, but you can tweak the amount of money each side starts with, as well as the starting tech level. There's also skirmish mode, which allows you to play single tactical battles against the computer on land or in space. Acquiring credits for units requires you to capture and control structures or areas of the map that generate money. Most multiplayer battles will be skirmishes, and you can play up to eight players online or over LAN. Thus far, the online performance has been pretty good, and it's been easy to find matches through LucasArts' matchmaking system. It's also possible to play a multiplayer head-to-head campaign match against a friend--obviously these can take a while, so you have the ability to save the match and reload it to continue later.
The graphics and sound in Empire at War are uniformly breathtaking. We already mentioned the epic nature of space battles and the sense of scale imparted by the different ships. The land battles are also impressive, as you'll see huge AT-STs and AT-ATs lumbering around while dozens of infantry scurry about underneath their feet. The weather effects look great, and there's a good variety of different tilesets. There's even a neat cinematic camera that you can switch to in order to give you a more movielike view of the battlefield. You lose control of the game in this mode, so it's not something you're going to be using a lot, but when you do steal a peek, it can show some great perspectives of the battlefield, even if the texturing up close doesn't look so hot. The camera's not perfect--a lot of times it'll show you a view of nothing in particular, but you can cycle through different angles using the space bar. The only graphical caveat is that the game can chug at times, even on a moderately-outfitted computer. On our 2.53GHz Pentium 4 rig with a GeForce 6800 card, we'd experience some slowdown with all the settings turned up at 1600x1200, but nothing that made the game unplayable. The sharp-looking explosions and shadow effects were well worth it.