Reviewed: December 19, 2007
Reviewed by: John DeWeese
Publisher
Sierra Entertainment
Developer
Mad Doc Software
Released: November 6, 2007
Genre: Strategy
Players: 1-8
5
6
5
5
5.5
System Requirements:
Recommended System:
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
There's a special place in many strategy gamers' hearts for the Empire Earth series. The first Empire Earth helped pioneer "race through the ages" gameplay, allowing you to take a Stone Age tribe and lead them to victory into the space age thousands of years later. Victory often went to players who could advance to the next technological era the fastest, launching stealth bomber runs on those poor sods still trying to build castles.
So I couldn’t help but see the irony that the latest title– Empire Earth III – seems centuries behind its competitors. This latest game from Sierra might as well be sub-titled “Real Time Strategy For Dummies.” The developers must have decided that what the strategy genre really needed was a game where the factions are nearly identical; the tech, economy, and diplomacy systems are uninspired; and the computer AI is lackluster at best and downright brain dead at worst. Compounding these issues are random crashes, memory leaks, and really annoying voiceovers. The result is a watered-down, err I mean streamlined, hodgepodge that never delivers the historical complexity and gameplay depth most strategy fans crave.
Whereas the first and second Empire Earths allowed you to choose from dozens of unique civilizations, this time you get a whopping choice of three factions. The Western faction offers expensive but powerful units. The Far Eastern faction is all about hordes of cheap infantry. Finally, the Middle Eastern faction excels at hit-and-run attacks with its fast cavalry. Yes I know the trinity worked for Starcraft, but in a game that supposedly simulates thousands of years of military history, shouldn’t players have a lot more choices than playing three conglomerated factions?
In World Domination mode, you must attempt to rule the world through dominating in both turn-based and real time strategy. The turn-based game is only slightly more complicated than Risk, but still fun. Your goal of course is to conquer the world one province at a time, although dozens of neutral tribes and several empires will stand in your way. Provinces can produce military, imperial, commerce or research points, and you'll need a good mix of all four to win.
Commerce and military points allow you to buy new armies; imperial points give you bonuses in battle; and research points allow you to advance to the next era. Your decisions on the turn map determine how many troops you will take into any real-time battle, as well as if you get certain bonuses like resistance fighters or sneak attacks. You can also use spies to disrupt enemy production and cheap militia to help bolster your defenses.
All battles on the turn-based map are then actually fought out in a RTS match, and this is where the game unfortunately falls apart. Your armies will have a strange mix of units working together, such as Roman spearmen, Greek cavalry, and Scottish skirmishers if you're playing the Western faction. Supposedly the combat system takes a rock/paper/scissors approach, where each unit has certain strengths and weaknesses that can be exploited. But simply churning out units and hurling them into battle also works just fine.
Well, I shouldn't say there's no micromanaging involved, because the path-finding is some of the worst I've seen in a long time. On regular occasions reinforcements would get completely bogged down when one unit couldn't find its way around terrain. The good news though is the enemy units also suffer from the same problem. In one case I was pleasantly surprised to find my onager escaped certain destruction by slipping behind a stand of trees. What I will praise Empire Earth III for is bringing the "turtle" defensive style of play back in style. Walls, towers, and forts are all relatively easy to build and do a good job of blunting any attack that doesn't include lots of siege engines.
The economy and diplomacy systems are equally stripped to the bones. You only have to track wealth, which can be generated by trade caravans, and resources, which can be harvested from various nodes around the map. It doesn't matter if you build your warehouse next to a forest node or a mine node – they all generate the same resource points. The good news is your workers are easy to keep track of, since they are permanently assigned to either caravan or warehouse duty. Likewise, resource nodes never seem to run dry. Meanwhile, diplomacy often means little more than bribing neutral civilizations with gold and resources to be your friend. Often it's just as cost effective to destroy them.
Since Empire Earth is a "race through the ages" game, a final word should be said about technology. In the single player game, you advance to the next era after slowly building up enough resource points on the turn-based map. In skirmish or multiplayer games, all you have to do is pay to upgrade to the next era. The first three eras all feel roughly the same, with the exception that your units are more heavily armored in medieval times and carry primitive guns in colonial times.
Things start to get interesting in modern and future times, when you add tanks, gunships, and genetically engineered super soldiers to the mix. But I couldn't shake the feeling that the only real differences between an ancient archer and rocket launcher are looks and higher unit stats. You have a few extra tricks up your sleeve when you hit future tech, but for the most part the battles still slogs along as they did back in 3,000 BC.
There are some high points to the game's visual style. Buildings and units are cartoonish but evocative of whatever faction they belong to. The West is a mix between Greco-Roman and barbarian styles; the Middle East appears to be a mish-mash of Arab and Babylonian styles; and the Far East appears to be heavy influenced by China and Japan, with some Mongols thrown in for good measure. Also, the terrain is absolutely beautiful, especially the water. Everything looks good from afar, but don't expect to see lots more detail by zooming in.
The biggest drawback is the bright neon colors that denote different factions. Not only is neon teal ugly for a RTS game, but it makes it hard to tell who's your enemy and who's your friend when the neighboring friendly tribe is colored bright turquoise. Furthermore, the game's weather system makes it near impossible to see anything when a rain or sand storm kicks up.
The music is pretty good but what ruins everything is the really bad voiceovers. The lame in-game jokes seem like they were written for the amateur geek comedian contest at last year's GenCon. The jokes your troops will constantly crack range from mildly entertaining (to the victor goes the whiskey!) to downright groan-inducing (I ride with the wind! It's the beans!)
Sierra should have followed Blizzard and only subjected you to the worst sort of gamer humor when you repeatedly click on a unit. But in Empire Earth III, I was subjected to "I put hole in my head! Ouch!" every time I needed my builder to whip up a new barracks.
The single player campaign is a slog, especially since battles in later eras just aren't much more interesting than in ancient times. The multiplayer skirmish system is actually robust, allowing you to set tech levels, army size, and even give handicaps if a really good player is squaring off against a newbie. The problem is there doesn't seem to be a huge fan base for a run-of-the-mill RTS with some serious game crashing bugs.
From my perspective, the worst thing Sierra did was dumb down the tech options and various factions. Watching a fight between Spartans and Samurai would be a lot more fun than between generic Western spearman and generic Far Eastern swordsman. I really can't recommend this game to even Empire Earth fans at full price, though it might make a fun diversion several months down the road when the price drops by at least half.
Empire Earth III seems like the WalMart of strategy games – you can find almost anything you want, but most of it is utter junk. Sure, it's cool to watch your troops go from bronze spears to laser guns. But then again the Age of Empires and Total War series do a much better job of recreating ancient combat, and if I want to have fun with giant armored robots I'll go play Supreme Commander.
The game does offer some old school RTS fun, but then technical glitches get in the way. The Empire Earth devs aimed for the lowest common denominator, somehow not realizing that simple and easy doesn't always equal fun.