Empire Earth III

"Several major bugs and design decisions lead to a truly aweful sequel to the EE lineage"

Quick Note:
I'm reviewing the game as of Monday, January 14th 2008. The game at present has had 1 patch, and I've already applied it, so don't think the problems I'll be listing below will all be resolved in a patch.

I'm going to go category by category here:

Graphics: 1/10

The problem is not the graphics themselves per se, but the massive issues with the rendering engine that constantly degrade graphics over time. When you have 1-2 starting units the game looks reasonable. When you start producing units to build your army and your economy, the game degrades graphical performance pretty much constantly until you are left with something that is far, far worse than games from the early 2001 era. High degrees of pixelation and what seems to be an un patched video memory leak. These problems were far more pronounced pre-patch, and it's entirely possible that a second or future patch will resolve these issues, but for now, the engine is simply too flawed.

Sound: 1/10

The ambient sounds are annoying and mediocre. The primary problem is that the music will ramp up and play 'war' sounds at times when you are not under attack... so you can easily be distracted by them. Distractions such as this are game breaking in an intense RTS and games should minimize them when possible. When I find out I'm looking for a non-existent attack, it breaks me out of "The Zone" and reduces the overall fun factor.

The dialog from clicking on units is just aweful. The voice acting isn't so bad, but the script is very shallow - most units seem to have 10 or less phrases and you'll run through most of them within a few games. Most of the phrases try to be funny. That lasts for about the first game or so. But imagine being told the same joke by the same person 100s of times. Serious problem. It would be better if they had 1 simple "OK, sir." phrase and a joke phrase you get 1 time out of 100. The 1 phrase would be something you could just mentally filter out, and wouldn't be nearly as grating.

It's sad when something like audio would be better off having NONE and except for needing to hear 'we're under attack' I would mute the whole thing.

Economy: 1/10

The economy setup in the game is hideous. Your economy is driven by four units (for the west at least - I haven't gone into the middle east and far east civs in detail):
Builders
Trade Caravans
Miners
Fishing Boats (if on a water map)

The boats require you to micro them to start their fishing, and once you do you can't click them to make them stop, and say, get out of the way of the enemy. They just go on auto pilot. Kinda ridiculous as you may want to explore with them...

Miners do nothing but sit at mines gathering resources. Caravans do nothing but travel between markets and cities gathering wealth. Both are completely hands-off.

Builders build stuff, they only contribute to your economy by building markets and warehouses. Once you built a reasonable number of buildings, they kinda just take up population. This isn't like Empire Earth 1 where you can have them chop wood or otherwise contribute. There is a limit to the number of city centers that can be built. Warehouses can only be built on top of mines. Markets are 1-per-city limited. Houses only increase population capacity up to 200 units per player max. Once you're done building economic buildings, all they can do is make military buildings that will help you produce units faster. Also, space is EXTREMELY cramped on most maps unless you place buildings in a tight formation. Since the west can only build on it's own turf this is a major annoyance and eventually leads to your builders being total wastes.

The economy has two resources: raw materials and wealth. raw materials are used for buildings, military units, builders, and boats. Wealth is used to upgrade units, buy extra trade caravans and miners, and to buy a very limited number of military units. In the last two epochs it pays for air strikes.

There are several reasons this setup earns EE3 a 1/10. First, the market/raw materials setup has been done before and fails miserably to innovate in the slightest. It is a clone of other games in the genre to the point where a copyright infringement case would have merit. But even in copying, EE3 comes up short. Unlike many 'market' implementations, there is no way to purchase nor sell raw materials for wealth.

The lack of more than 2 resource types makes things considerably more bland than previous EE games, where you wanted to find ways to balance out the economic output of several resources. In EE1, for example, you had 4 resources and the best armies could take advantage of spending all the resources they were producing. That took some thought and planning as to what your army was comprised of. In EE3 every military unit takes raw materials, so no such planning can be made.

The restriction on the number of markets makes games considerably less expansive; in EE1 your economy had little in the way of upper bounds beyond what iron, stone, food, and gold piles you could find and defend. In EE3 you can "max out" very quickly. This, with the other factors above, greatly reduce the fun factor.

Military: 2/10

The game still features the traditional Rock-Paper-Scissors setup from Empire Earth 1. However, there are now far less choices for units. You have basic infantry, anti-cav infantry, and cavalry forming one type of 'RPS.' Infantry, Anti-Infantry Siege Weapons (Field Weapons), and Cavalry form a second type of 'RPS.' And that's it, at least until modern when air power shows up. There's a choice between long swords and bow weilding females for your pick of basic infantry, but they still fill identical rolls as near as I can tell, so you're always better off with archers since they can exploit concentrated fire and bad path finding.

Control is completely HORRIBLE. Your units cannot reliably path around ANY obstructions, including hills, bridges, coastlines, buildings, and enemies. Issuing an attack-move is a wild-guess as to whether or not your units will in fact attack enemies that come into line of sight. Often they will stop, sit there, and do nothing, even ranged units will not attack. I have seen dozens of siege weapons 'dance' back and forth, spinning while trying to line up a shot, and due to bad pathing they NEVER line up properly and will spend MINUTES trying to get off a shot. Issuing a formation move command often results in formations that are gigantic and useless.. your units will decide to spread themselves to the point of absurdity. I'd have as few as 16 units spread themselves out over 4 screens, instead of packing tight like they should. There is no formation button as there was in EE1. Also, clicking on units seems to be very picky, you click to select something and your focus only stays for a second. it could be my mouse being jittery... but nothing else exhibits the issue.

Single Player Campaign: 2/10

World Dom is buggy, tedious, and the patch INVALIDATES YOUR PREVIOUS SAVE GAMES. (I patched and then my 3hrs went down the toilet.. great.)

There are many campaign specific techs, and things like spies. However, the spies seem to be totally useless as are most of the techs. They're expensive even with the patch, and by the time you have the resources for them you have already won. I managed to use the West's highest level tech, Shock and Awe, on my final battle. The battle started with a massive bombing raid on my opponent who was still in medieval, and somehow dozens of 10,000lbs bombs were not enough to kill his starting base of 3 guys and a camel. I wish I was making this up. I had to send ground troops in to finish off the camel. Once I did, the CPU died. Any time you can have a high altitude bomber shove 10,000lbs of ordinance up a camels rear and NOT have it die, you know you have a serious problem hit detection, unit strength, bomber power levels, or all of the above.

Single Player Skirmish: 1/10

The game is too easy when playing normal Ai vs a 'good' player. You can set a handicap on yourself or give the AI a boost by settings, but I don't think it will matter much. The AI is still quite slow and I creamed it easily without even looking up a good build order or real strategy beyond "make army and send it after establishing an economy."

Multi Player: not reviewed

I haven't bothered with MP, since the SP was so bad. I can't imagine it being much better with the limited range of units.

Overall I would give this about 1.2, and I am being generous. I'm rounding up to 2.0 because the game does start, and I reserve the 1.0 rating for things like Myth 2 where you uninstall it and it blows up your hard drive, or games that flat out do not run where you have to get your money back from best buy or whoever. The 2/10 for military is pushing it. The game just isn't fun. This game has 5 epochs, the original had over twice as many. This game has 5-6 meaningful units, the original had dozens. The original had food iron gold wood and stone as resources, this has two (research doesn't count in my book, as it's only used to epoch up). Many of the things it does are pretty direct rip offs of other games. The markets are a rip from AOE, territory is a rip from RON and a bad idea poorly implemented, etc. etc.. The game is a huge step back and missing several features from previous EE games and RTSs in general. Much of what it tried to accomplish with World Dom mode is made useless by the costs, or is unbalancing, or just useless period. The AI is a joke by default. Even Empire Earth 1's "Cheat like you can't believe and never surrenders" AI is more fun.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 01/24/08

Game Release: Empire Earth III (US, 11/06/07)