Age of Empires III

"Great RTS, Awesome Gameplay!"

An excellent game for all those RTS fans who love the AoE series. No doubt this one is the best in the series! If you love RTS games I recommend you buy it if you have 50 bucks. The game has great game play in addition to the new home city feature, Stunning Graphics if you have a 64 or higher graphics card, and a super story line, but I don't like the fact that the story is non-historical events. The multiplayer is also a great feature but there are some annoyances.

The game play is spectacular! It's much better than AoE II. There are new additions to the game that enhance the game play such as trading posts and home cities. Your explorer can build trading posts, they can be built by Native American tribes and by trade routes. Native Americans can help you greatly if you build a lot of trading posts at their tribes and become their allies. When allied with the Natives you can train Native soldiers and research upgrades that help economy and training speed. Trade posts built by trading routes can help gather recourses and earn experience for your home city. As a home city levels up it gets more available cards, which you can, ad to your deck. A deck is 20 cards, these cards are also called shipments. Shipments contain recourses, soldiers and upgrades.

Campaign mode is a lot more fun than it was in AoE II, not because of the story itself but because of the gameplay. The story is good, but what I don't like is that they didn't use real historical events in the game. Overall though the story was good enough for me to have fun and actually play it. Most of the time I don't play the campaign in RTS games.

The graphics in the game are stunning from what I saw on the back of the box. My computer is only 2 years old and has a good enough graphics card for Age of Mythology, but not for AoE III. My graphics are good but not great, they are nothing near the graphics on the box. You might not have as much fun if your graphics card is low so I don't recommend this game for computers with low graphics cards.

Online is the most fun part of the game, but is also the most annoying part of the game too. Ensemble did an ok job on the game browser. The main flaw of the browser was mainly the chance of joining a game: you won't be able to join most of the games. A message will appear that will say, “failed to join game”. There is also lagg in many of the online games which does get annoying. But other than that it was pretty good and also a lot more fun to play people.

Overall, this game is Great! I recommend it to all you RTS fans. You should pick up a copy if you have a good computer but if you have an old one I wouldn't waste 50 bucks on this. * four stars* 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/14/06