Empire Earth

The Good
First, the fact that you get planes and over 10 different Epochs is pretty darn interesting. They had a good idea for civ attributes too. The campaigns are mildly engaging for a RTS. Cool resources.(wood,food,stone,iron,gold). You get cavemen.

The Bad
The graphics. UGLY!!! You can zoom up real close to guys and that's a good thing, right?? WRONG!!!! Their clothes are horrible and their faces look like they have been transplanted directly from a game from the early 90's. This wouldn't be so bad if the building looked good, but they don't. They look so fake and are much poorer than AOE 2. Before I mentioned Epochs. Pretty much the same thing as ages in AOE. But now it takes a minimum of 6 hours to get from the pre-historic era to the Nano-Age. This translates into the game being an "age race" for the first 6 hours. The resources are ok, but you need tons of them to get to a new age. In Aoe, 1000 of anything was considered alot, but in EE, you need over 8000 food to get into some ages!!! This too could be overlooked if you could get some good tactical combat in, but NOOO!! It's pretty straightforward in the beginning, but after you advance a couple Epochs, there are over 15 units all with their weaknesses and strengths. Monks are also useless. You have so much micro-managing to do, that you don't have time to use them effectively. Planes have poor A.I. Instead of making it simple and just having it hover around or stay in the hanger, they fly around in circles!!?? Why!!?? This makes it very difficult to group them together or get them to go anywhere. Fuel is another pain. This fuel means that every few minutes, they have to return to the hanger to refuel. So you always have to have them "refuel" because they fly around wasting fuel and chances are it will be half gone before you find them. Stop Atomic Bombers is another pain. Diligent gamer as I am, I built turrets and aa guns all around my Island. This was useless, as I was informed that my aa guns were attacking something. Zooming over there, I find an atomic bomber fly past my aa guns, fly over 30 something villagers and nuke them out of existence!! I was livid. I had paid a pretty penny for those AA guns and they had been ineffective.They had not even done the job they were erected for in the first place. Another large bug was that, in the last Epoch, you get to build these big robot things. They are incredibly expensive, but I said to myself that they were worth it. They're not!!! They cost more than they are any good and seem to be good against nothing in particular. This is odd because nearly every other unit has a strength and weakness, but these robots apparently don't. Expect alot of waiting, as, unlike AOE, you do alot of waiting for resources. Forget about getting up a well balanced army.(i.e. I'll bring my infantry away from the calvary and bring in the pikemen) Battles are so fast and hectic that you can't move your guys around because 1. They don't instantly respond to commands and 2. They move slowly, even the Calvary.

The Bottom Line
This game is a poor RTS. If you already have Age of Empires, don't waste your money on this. If you don't have AOE, get that instead.

The Good
The campaigns bring life to the history that you only read in books and articles. There's absolutely no end to variety as you not only play through the scenarios, but have the ability to customise your own in the editor. Even the random maps make for a nice break from the campaigns. And finally the tutorial is very helpful, although it doesn't teach you how to make tributes to another sect. The Russian Campaign is perhaps very creative for a hypothetical world domination by political extremists, then time travel fixes that.

The graphics are very well textured, the units smoothly animated even for polygonal voxelated actors and the camera pans well across the map. The unit, structure and ambient sounds are crisp and keep you aware of what is happening as you play. And of course there is a good selection of units, though you find yourself playing rock-paper-scissors (shock-piercing-arrows) against opponents in the earlier epochs.

The Bad
The campaigns could have done with better historical accuracy, especially the alternate history where the Germans won World War II, though that is forgivable. The use of prophets really makes playing scenarios far too easy.

The annoyances abundant in the game are the music tracks which sound very samey and don't really match all the epochs. Then there's the ever-irritating "We're under attack!" warning, which goes on and on. And some sound effects we could do without are the dying sounds of primitive period units which sound like puking. Leaving it at that, there's not that much to put you off playing at all.

The Bottom Line
You may think it's all been done before in the Age of Empires series, but Empire Earth's collection of all epochs in one game is ambitious for its time. It's really brought out the best of historical-themed strategy games. Audio isn't perfect, but just enough to make the game lively. After you play through each and every scenario the game has to offer, you'll be hungry for more.

The Good
So nice real time strategy game

The Bad
One game is too long and can be more than 30 hours

The Bottom Line
Often the same way to win against IA is to build towers evrywhere