Typical strategy game. Similiar to Empire Earth, but with Star Wars!
I can only compare it with Empire Earth, because I haven't played Age of Empires.
It has 4 technology levels and a whole bunch of technologies to research, and they are all scattered around. There's war centers for war related technologies, research center for general stuff, command posts for workers and medics, all the resource outposts for resource gathering upgrades... Almost every building has it's own technogies to research. Unlike in Empire Earth 2 or Rise of Nation, where there is only 1 building, but less technologies.
Let's move on to gameplay.
As I already have said, it's a typical RTS game where you build your own empire, gather resources and trade with allies.
You don't have your own territory like in EE2 or RoN.
It's fun to play and easy to pickup. There's many campaigns to choose from and there is also a tutorial campaign. You can also play custom games and make your own scenarios and campaigns.
Let's talk about the customs games.
There's some civilizations to choose from, they are all familiar from the movies.
You can choose the map size, type, game type and invidual difficulties to the players.
I have actually a comment about the difficulties. First I played with the very easy difficulty, It was very easy so I chose the easy difficulty. It's a lot harder. I haven't tried the others yet, because I'm not a RTS god or something.
As far as the graphics go, they reminf me a bit about Fallout.
It's pretty good, but It's released a one day after Empire Earth (13, November 2001) which has a lot better graphics. So they could have done better with the graphics.
Another comment about the graphics is that they should have animated the water. It doesn't look like water, because it's not moving.
That's why I prefer playing on maps without the water being so important.
Summary.
Well it's a typical... You know.
It's a lot of fun, especially for Star Wars fans.
It reveals somethings what happens between episodes 3-4, which is pretty interesting.
Few minuses on the graphics though.