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The original Empire Earth was an interesting twist on the Age of Empires style real-time strategy mojo, offering a number of starting cultures and a slew of epochs to evolve them through. Never played the sequel, but I hear it was mainly too complicated for it's own good, and only loved by the most obsessive. There's no fear of that in number three, a game so stripped down and bereft of originality
The main and only real single player mode is World Domination. You start off picking from one of three factions and asserting your power over feeble natives to conquer a spot on the globe as the start of your fledging empire. From there, you can raise armies, form alliances with one of the two other budding superpowers, and develop a number of one shot tricks to give you the edge, like better roads that help move your forces along. It's a bit simplistic compared to the Civilization series, but it gets the job done. Then it's a matter of spinning the globe and choosing your next target.
It feels like something produced for the budget shelf, but even when it gets there, it'll be a little hard to justify a purchase
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Some battles can be auto-resolved, though most have you descending with your various armies to the RTS layer, and here's where things start to break down. For starters, the game isn't very visually appealing, even with all the settings on high. The environments are simplistic and the various characters are garish and ugly, though the buildings in general fare much better. Another problem is the game suffers from poor optimization. I have a rig that can run Crysis with all the bells and whistles, but it struggles with this game. I also like to alt-tab out to do other things while playing computer games, but EE3 always refuses to load up afterwards.
The basics of the RTS side of things should be immediately familiar. You stake claim to a portion of territory, raising your buildings to garner resources and produce more troops to bolster your army. Sometimes it'll be a straight shot to either conquer or coerce the other forces to gain victory, and other times there will be special objectives, such as wiping out the native temples to assert your own religious rule. The problem is either way the battles end just as they're getting started. Against natives, you can usually run up the resources and bribe your way to victory, while the special objectives tend to be solved just as the big conflict is about to commence. Later in the game when you've advanced a few epochs and are facing off against other factions, things start to get more interesting, but it's all too little too late, and still suffers from two serious problems.
Empire Earth III would have been a fairly solid and unimaginative RTS if not for two cardinal sins. The first and most unforgivable is the horribly broken pathfinding. RTS games are mainly about moving massive armies across the map, so the armies have to...well, move. In EE3, I've seen my forces run in place stuck on nothing, refuse to go up clearly marked hill, refuse to fight enemies standing right next to them, go in the opposite direction I've clicked, and very frequently get in each other's way. This is made all the worse by the odd map designs, which sometimes reduce the playing area to a series of narrow tunnels that occasionally open up into brief clearings. If that wasn't enough, the fog of war is so thick that troops can only see about a foot in front of them, which reduces the early part of the battle to a game of blind man's bluff. Most of the time is spent wandering aimlessly in search of the enemy, who have been busily building up their army while you stumble around in the dark. While multiplayer is about as tactical as a zerg rush. The games always seem to be reduced to running up the research tree as quickly as possible to power build futuristic death machines.
Overall, Empire Earth III just feels cheap. Poor visuals, poorly thought out design choices, a completely lack of originality...It feels like something produced for the budget shelf, but even when it gets there, it'll be a little hard to justify a purchase when it'll be standing shoulder to shoulder with such polished RTS games as Company of Heroes and Age of Empires III. Unless you've already played all the RTS games on the market and are left craving for more, pass this one by. |
