What can you tell me? How close to an RPG is it? How does it stack up to Space Hulk (which is about the closest thing to Imperial Assault that I think I've played) What expansions are essential? Do you need the extra dice pack? Is it easy to pick up the rules? How difficult would it be to come up with extra campaign missions? Are there any fan made campaigns?

Thanks in advance.

Well, if you need to be competitive at skirmish you'll probably want four of the grey Royal Guard cards, which means four copies of the core set. Do you feel that? I feel that. It feels like déjà vu.

1) There are persistent elements using XP and credits, and the Imperial player sort of acts like a GM. It feels moderately like an RPG.

2) I've only played the Steam version of Space Hulk (and the old DOS-based version, but that's neither here nor there). This feels a bit more like Dust, but with a more restrictive tile set and less figures. Somebody could probably draw a better parallel with Descent, but seeing as how I've never played it, that person isn't me. To better answer your question, I don't see this being altogether similar to Space Hulk.

3) None of the expansions are essential, but they do come with extra side missions and some rewards. In fact, the core set comes with all of the useable heroes; none of the expansion characters are usable as PCs, so to speak. If you earn the ally pack as a reward, the team gets control of that character, but you (collectively) only get one ally per mission. So if you've earned both Chewie and Han, you have to pick one or the other at the outset of the mission.

4) You don't need an extra dice pack. Personally, I'd recommend the SW dice app. Now that I've added Imperial Assault and Edge of the Empire to my gaming habits, I've found the $5 app to be a solid investment.

5) The rules are relatively simple, but there's a lot of information to digest between the three different guides that accompany the core set, and then you have an entire campaign booklet on top of that. Prepare to set aside a healthy amount of time to read through all of it.

6) Probably not that hard. Terminal and objective tokens are used to represent all manner of goals, so as long as you have the imagination to construct your own map and narrative elements, you can probably add to the campaign with ease. Personally, I'd love to see FFG deliver a method of custom hero creation using generic figures.

I'm not sure about your experience with RPGs, but in my groups, we've always believed in a nice balance of non-combat with combat. Obviously, the focus in SW:IA is on ground combat, so there's not any of the negotiation, discussion with NPCs, or any of that kind of stuff that to me is the best part of an RPG.

That being said, besides persistence of characters etc., there are a good number of storytelling elements that make it feel like an RPG. But understand at its essence, it's a ground combat game. I find there to be far more of an RPG feel than Space Hulk.

The additional figures are nice, to be able to use them rather than tokens. The extra cards with those figures are worth more than the figures.

You can already be reading the rules, and they are online. They are straightforward enough, but take your time and don't rush through them.

Because of the detail and depths of the campaign, it would be very difficult to come up with your own. One or two campaigns combined with skirmish is more than enough gaming out of this box. I'll be off to the small box expansion after that.

Campain mode feels, to me very much influenced by story driven RPG-TBS computer games (Shadowdrun, Fire Emblem, XCOM). You get rewarded with percs and various ways to upgrade the characters, the Imperial player also gets similarly rewarded. There are also lots of nice triggered events within each mission that change the dynamic of play, something that I personally haven't seen used to this level in a board game yet.

Other than this WonderWAAAGH and kac have said everything I would have...

Campain mode feels, to me very much influenced by story driven RPG-TBS computer games (Shadowdrun, Fire Emblem, XCOM). You get rewarded with percs and various ways to upgrade the characters, the Imperial player also gets similarly rewarded. There are also lots of nice triggered events within each mission that change the dynamic of play, something that I personally haven't seen used to this level in a board game yet.

Other than this WonderWAAAGH and kac have said everything I would have...

Your comparison to Shadowrun and XCOM (the computer games) is spot on, that is very much what it feels like.

As a tabletop rpg GM/player, I wouldn't call Imperial Assault a role playing game. It has some of the core elements of an rpg, like a structured campaign, xp, and purchasable equipment, but there's absolutely no Role-play, as in social interactions & social skills. There's also the fact that if either side, rebel or Imp, gains an advantage through winning more missions than the other, the game starts to swing more and more to the winner's advantage, but there's no way to re-balance it like there is in an rpg game where the GM sets the difficulty and rewards according to the player character's level/experience. You could house rule it to make it more of an rpg, but I think it would be a lot of work.

This is a purely tactical game within a campaign story arc. That said, the minis, tiles, tokens, and possibly even the campaign itself (with a little reworking), could be used for an Age of Rebellion game. Force & Destiny, and Edge of the Empire could work too, but there's not as much force users and fringers as you'd like for those two in the current and future waves.