Empire Earth III

"Further butchery to the Empire Earth name"

So, here I am back for another review after a disappointing Empire Earth 2. The front cover of the game looked rather interesting in the shop, showing middle age war and a futuristic war, with a somewhat menacing looking black haired man standing in the middle. So the third game in the EE series is still allowing us to epoch up to the future.

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Gameplay
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3/10: It is difficult, confusing and overall just an annoyance. It feels like the developers have tried too hard on everything. This is not Empire Earth, this is a totally different game. Resource gathering has virtually been removed, which is what players play RTS games for. I find the game to be quite ridiculous as it is so unrealistic, I don't expect RTS games to be very realistic. But when I send a helicopter gunship to kill some people it seems like they are firing rubber bullets, I sit there waiting for about 10 minutes for one helicopter to kill 2 citizens, yes citizens the ones that build and repair things. This is just one of the extreme circumstances I've found. Then there's the glitches. My units cannot manoeuvre properly half the time in a map which has a lot of trees, mountains and other features. Then there's the stuck inside building glitch, your units get stuck inside the entrance where your units exit the building, basically rendering that building useless. I avoid building walls because my units keep getting stuck in them. There's only five epochs, and that's for the entire human history including the future. This results huge upgrades from very premature rifles to super hi-tech lasers. Also as each epoch in the game spans such a great length of time in human history, you get silly clashes between epoch units, like 18th century cannons battling along-side futuristic lasers and helicopters. This really took away any hint of realism that the game had left in it.

The game regularly crashes on you, I thought this could my system until I discovering message boards being flooded with the same problem and professional reviewers with the latest systems having the same problem.

The fact that a 300mb patch was released a mere 2 days after the game was released really annoyed me. If they knew about so many problems why did they release it? I can only assume they released it to get more sales before the hype died down. I don't understand why they couldn't release it on December so it gets sold in the Christmas rush. It would better than throwing it out without properly ironing out all the problems with the game, nobody likes downloading 300mb patches after installing 4 gigs worth which can over half an hour on some systems.

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Graphics
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3/10: The graphics are reasonably good, but I've given it a 3/10, why is that you ask? Because they've produced good graphics on an engine that simply can't handle them. The minimum specs are totally wrong, I am considerably above the minimum spec and I still get lag even after turning all the graphics to minimum. The developers admittedly went towards the more cartoon-like look, but the fact still stands. The engine is simply awful, I have read that people with even the ‘fastest' and ‘latest' graphics cards still struggle. It feels as if the developers have gone towards a serious game but with cartoon-like graphics which just doesn't work.

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Sound/Audio
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2/10: I found the music a bit average compared to the previous Empire Earth games, but still feel that Empire Earth 1 music is still superior to the newer games in the series. I gave this such a low score because the voice-overs are just so silly it's not even funny, it turns a war game into a joke.

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Challenge
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10/10: I had trouble playing the campaigns without falling asleep, or being tempted to uninstall it. The campaigns are quite long, but the only reason I'd play it is to ‘try' and get my moneys worth. Aside from the campaigns, the AI is stupid and seems very limited to what it actually can do. The AI only builds about 30% of what is in its arsenal, so already you know what the opponent is going to do. I am sure a carefully formulated strategy could be created which is always full-proof, resulting in the computer always losing, no matter what the settings or scenario. Were the developers too lazy to finish this? For a company that boasts about it's AI programming “Games. Intelligence Added.” this is could be considered somewhat a joke.

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Controls/GUI
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5/10: The user interface felt space themed, I didn't find it very interesting or eye catching compared to the past Empire Earth games. Some of the writing protrudes out of the boxes on the statistics screen which just makes you wonder what happened in the beta testing phase. The in-game interface isn't anything special.

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Replay Value
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1/10: If you enjoy playing a game that has so many problems, then you must have a serious amount of patience. I don't play games that annoy me from the start, so it is unlikely I'd be coming back to play this again. I would sell it to someone I didn't like, they'd then find out what a waste of time/money it is.

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Fun Factor
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0/10: It's not fun, it is just annoying. The combination of annoying voice-overs, crashes, imbalances, epoch clashing units and other glitches having fun is actually a challenge in itself. Free flash games on viral websites are more fun than this.

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Overall
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2/10: A huge disappointment, a lot of hype was put into this game. But when it all boiled down to it, the unstable and glitch-filled game just doesn't cut it. I wasn't the only one feeling this way, as seeing every EE3 message board being flooded with similar complaints, professional reviews included, this just reassured my dislike for this game. If EE2 didn't satisfy you as much as EE1 did, then you'd be wasting your time/money playing this atrocity. This game certainly doesn't deserve to have ‘Empire' or ‘Earth' in its name.

GOOD POINTS
-Interesting unit animation
-Cool front cover
-It has Empire Earth in the name
-It comes with an uninstaller

BAD POINTS
-Crashes/glitches/bugs
-Balance issues
-Annoying voice-overs
-Useless AI

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/20/07

Game Release: Empire Earth III (EU, 11/16/07)