Empire Earth

The Good
Sierra really tried to make Empire Earth seem like Age of Empires 3. They advertized every single team member of theirs that was even related to Age of Empires, pointed out in what ways their game was better, etc. If they hadn't done this, I might have enjoyed Empire Earth more.

The game has okay music; I didn't like it as much as AoE's music, but it was still nice.

The Bad
I didn't like this game from the start. The first impression I had was 'damn, my citizens are ugly!'. The 3d models really aren't very good, excepting a few nice looking buildings and mechanical things later.

There aren't enough units and researches to get for each age, and the advancment between ages is too steep. The problem with this is that every player is quickly jumping ahead in ages as soon as they have maxed out researches, instead of stopping to build an army in-between; it becomes a kind of weird race against time instead of tactical battle. The first player to max out basically wins, because he can nuke the blazing daylights out of every single other civilization (litteraly...) while they're still advancing to the age where such things are possible. If two players advance at pretty much the same time, havoc ensues and the game becomes a boring slugfest almost instantly.

The tactics are generally lacking. Terrain dosen't work as well in Age of Empires; whether it's their map makers, or limiations of their engine I'm not sure, because the map editer was very oddly put together and I couldn't make anything decent of my own.

The Bottom Line
Empire Earth really can't seem to get anything right. I'd rather play the original Age of Empires than this poorly designed ripoff.