STAR WARS™ Empire at War - Gold Pack
BANGER · Strategy · 2010
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $19.99.
- Length
- 23.5h
- Value
- $0.85/hr
- Reviews
- 98% positive
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Windows only.
Command or corrupt an entire galaxy in the definitive Star Wars strategy collection. It is a time of galactic civil war. Will you take up the reins of the Rebellion, assume control of the Empire, or rule the Star Wars Underworld?
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $4.99, set in May 2016. It has been discounted 62 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 65 percent off, with about 8 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 2 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 8 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre, and the best reviewed. It outscores the games it most resembles, including Homeworld Remastered Collection ($34.99, scores 65) and Nexus - The Jupiter Incident ($9.99, scores 53).
The math says it holds its tier up to $35.20, and you are being asked for $19.99.
This site sampled 749 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 6 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,492 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 81 percent of the 925 reviews written there were positive, against 98 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 23.5 hours. Doing everything runs 55, 2.3 times as long.
16 years after release it still had 2.8K people in it at once.
Players
2,818 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Base game is probably good, all my hours are in mods though. Thrawns Revenge and Fall of the Republic are crazy good.
This game has always been my favorite strategy game since childhood. Its probably the only good Star Wars strategy game and its basically 2 games in 1. Not only that, the mods this game has can be considered their very own game aswell like Thrawn's Revenge, Republic at war, etc. The storyline seems to be enjoyable with each faction having their own mechanics and unique units to control. Soundtrack is pretty good...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic), achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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STAR WARS™ Empire at War - Gold Pack scores 96/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/32470/star-wars-empire-at-war-gold-packThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 3, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.