Empire Earth

The Good
Make no mistake about it; Empire Earth IS a copy of Age of Empires. It looks, plays, and sounds the same. The graphics are the same, the interface is the same, the game is the same, right down to the resources and what they look like. The ONLY difference is that this game tacks on more technological development, right up to modern times and the "nano age."

This is a shameless ripoff in every way, but to its credit, it does it well. Age of Empires IS a good game, and so is Empire Earth. The graphics are crisp and easy on the eye, the interface is smooth, the sound is great and the gameplay is just as good as when Microsoft published it as Age of Empires. And it IS an upgrade; there are some nice rules changes, and far more units.

The Bad
The game has two major flaws. the first is the AI - which, incidentally, doesn't play fair. The computer doesn't follow the same rules the player does, as a result of which computer players are absurdly strong. Even at the lowest difficulty level, giving the player every possible advantage, the computer seems to get free resources and buildings Winning is very difficult, and will only happen with some luck.

The second is that in an effort to expand the game to modern times, the game zips by the technology progression way too fast. Whereas Age of Empires had four or five "Eras," this game has 15. The differences between Classical and Byzantine techs don't seem really apparent when you're buzzing through them at a rate of one era every fifteen minutes. The game's "epic" Civilization-style scope of the entirety of human history seems very contrived against a standard Age of Empires map.

The Bottom Line
Not the epic masterpiece it's being described as, and not a necessary purchase if you still enjoy your Age of Empires II set.

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
Before I start I just want to say that I'm reviewing the game WITH the patch. It is needed to play multiplayer, and multi is the only way (more on that later).

The multiplay is by far the best part of this game. The idea that a game can go all the way from prehistory to the nano age is a good idea. This wide range of ages gives you quite alot of units to play with. They are basically broken up into three sections: pre-gunpowder, gunpowder, and tanks/cybers. Each section requires different tactics, mostly because you have to gather resources in different ways. One thing that helps this game is the random age start, as it injects a bit of randomness. With it you cannot just do one thing every game; you have to be able to play in each section.

There are five different resources: food, wood, iron, gold, and stone. Only six citizens are allowed to gather from any one resource patch at a time, however this doesn't really hinder anything, as they gather at a nice speed even in the start. The gold, iron, and stone patches have so much in them that I have never seen one run out. You will probably never encounter a shortage in anything you need, if you manage it right. This type of economy makes it easy to focus more on your military, which is really the fun part in this game.

Practically every unit has a counter, with a couple notable exceptions. One exception is the spearman in stone age. The only way to beat a bunch of spearmen is with your own spearmen. However, that is really the only weak point. Tanks, for example, are countered by anti-tanks, which are in turn countered by infantry, which is countered by tanks. In the early gunpowder ages the gunpowder units can be countered by the cuirassier, a heavy cavalry. However, halberdiers are a good unit for killing cuirassiers. It's all give and take.

The graphics are nice, being in 3d, but it doesn't really add anything. You can also zoom in if you want (but not if you want to win).

The Bad
Even though it does have so many ages, chances are you won't play in more then two in one game. If you age up too fast you won't have near enough military to fend off an opponent who has been working on that. The units in one age don't really have that great an advantage over units in the age below, unless it's at the breakpoints (first gunpowder, first tanks). You'll NEVER play a game that goes from prehistory to nano, unless that's exactly what you set out to do, and everyone co-operates. It would also take at least an hour and a half to do.

The AI is simply terrible. Now, every AI in every RTS game cheats, but this AI cheats so much. I think they just gave up trying to program the AI in how to correctly gather resources. Instead, it seems to just get loads of free resource deliveries. You could kill every single citizen, and stand outside the AI's capitol killing every citizen that comes out, and it will STILL make citizens, it will STILL make units, and it will STILL age up at a rate reserved for people who are booming. Another problem with it is that it doesn't know when to give up and resign. This forces you to hunt down and kill every last unit it has. If you let a citizen get away it will just keep making stuff with those free resources.

The multiplayer server itself is crap. There is technically a spam filter, but all it does is delay the spam for about three seconds, it doesn't actually block it. There is a way to ignore people (/i "playernamehere") but it's not in the manual anywhere I can find. Someone who beta tested EE told me. Even so, the chat still lags, especially when someone starts to spam. The filter only lags it up more.

The list of people in the room isn't alphabetized, and when you have eighty people in a room and you're looking for one person, it can get frustrating really fast.

There's another little annoying bug that affects some people. If you alt select a team, or double click a team icon to zoom to them, then start to scroll, the screen will jump back to that team a second later. This makes it quite tricky to jump to a team then have them attack something nearby, as by then the screen will have jumped back and you'll have clicked somewhere behind the team. In the heat of battle this is a Bad Thing.

The single player campaigns aren't worth mentioning.

The Bottom Line
Bottom line, if you can tolerate the chat problems, and don't encounter any bugs, this game is worth it. You'll never need to bother with the single player campaigns or the AI, which is half of the problem. If you're looking for a fun multiplayer game, you might want to consider Empire Earth.