Age of Empires III

"Historically lacking and bettered by many other RTS games but it is still a solid game."

I never enjoyed the Age of Empires series of video games. RTS games are always special. They fuse together many aspects of other genres as well as requiring the player to have excellent hand-eye coordination and micro management skills (both of which are excellent skills to have in real life) Games like Starcraft and Total Annihilation have defined the series but it always nice to see new ideas in the genre. Unfortunately, Age of Empires 3 fails to deliver anything revolutionary and seems to rely on its namesake to sell. Again, I fail to see why this game has any respect at all considering the previous two installments of this game have been exceptionally poor. The historical concept is not a turn on. I play games to get away from the academic side of life, not to merge it with my leisure time. Unlike the Civilization series, which is highly enjoyable and does indeed contain some historical merit, Age of Empires 3 falls flat on its face and is not worth buying.

Graphically the game is great. The best part about them is the highly realistic manner in which buildings and ships get destroyed. Instead of just collapsing, the individual pieces fly about in correspondence to how the building was damaged. If a heavy cannon is utilized, then you will see pieces of wood and stone get hurled across the screen and if soldiers just assaulted the buildings then small bits of wood fall away. Ships will also get destroyed in this manner with their masts falling away first and holes appearing on the deck. It is excellent the way these things are displayed. Soldiers also die very realistically. Cannons will blast individual soldiers several feet away and they will just fall down, mortally wounded if they get killed by footmen. It really is superb the way the physics. Even trees, when cut down, will fall down extremely well. The textures and landscapes are also equally beautiful. Whether it's a snowy mountain or a dense, Amazonian forest, it really feels authentic. The only real problem with the graphics was the horrible character designs. Massive pixels randomly stick out of characters and they just don't seem smooth or polished at all. Character faces were blotchy and ugly especially when compared to other RTS games. Likewise, the camera is rather poor. It is very restricted. You can enable camera rotation from the options menu but it really isn't necessary. Rotating is slow and unresponsive as is edge scrolling. Buildings are built facing the exact same direction and it becomes very monotonous to see entire towns facing one direction. It's even worse to see multiple players build towns close to each other. Another massive problem was the lag. I recently ran Crysis at full settings on my PC so when I realized how much this game lags and slows down, I simply could not ignore it. When the entire screen clusters with 8 different armies, the game becomes PARALYSED with slowdown. It is absolutely unbearable. Home Cities are very well drawn but the people inhabiting them do not (they look as bad as all the character models) You can never change the view of the home city so after a few days it will become boring. Overall I was not overly impressed with the graphics but they were a commendable effort on the developer's part.

The sound was not very good. The little dialogue that there was, was executed in an extremely boring manner. I really could not attach myself to the characters that featured in the storyline, mainly because of their boring lines. The music does not leave an impression. In fact, I needed to open the game again to remember what it was! It is really forgettable. Even worse, were the unit sounds. Unlike Warcraft 3, all the units have just one line (might I add that it is one EXTREMELY BORING line) which they utter no matter what you tell them to do. Gunshots, musket blasts and cannons were the best sounding things. They were authentic and felt real. Swords clanging was not pleasant because there was only one sound that kept playing over and over and over again. Overall, the sound is pretty average.

It is not what a game looks like or sounds like but what it plays like. Perhaps a phrase that should be applied to every game. Unfortunately, the graphics and sound are better than the gameplay when regarding Age of Empires 3. At its heart, the game is a RTS that offers eight European civilizations attempting to conquer newly found America. On its surface, the game is a very poorly executed RTS game that offers eight minor variations of the same thing. Unlike Blizzards excellent games, Age of Empires 3 offers no different races. All eight are exactly the same save for 'The Spanish get one special unit and +15 bonus to blah blah blah' or 'The French get one special unit but don't have access to something else' and so on and so forth. There is no balance in the game. All the civilizations (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Ottoman, German and Dutch) have exactly the same units. However most civilizations get one special unit or structure that apparently balances the game. For this reason, I did not enjoy the game. There is no rock-paper-scissors element from Starcraft and all battles ultimately wind down to which player has the most units. There are three types of units, namely artillery, infantry and cavalry. Cavalry is strong against artillery, infantry is strong against cavalry and artillery is strong against infantry, or so the game claims. From my experience, infantry is next to useless against cavalry and artillery is exceptionally weak against certain units. The balancing mechanism is broken and again, numbers win. This takes the strategy out of the game completely. It is not worth it as an RTS game. Now ignoring the poor balancing of units, Age of Empires offers a wealth of other features, chief amongst them being the Home City element. In theory, your home city would be able to ship supplies as well as extra troops or ships to you after a period of time. Every few seconds or so you will receive a 'Home City' card that will allow you to access one of the cards that you pre-selected. The value of the card will then be shipped to you. Now that sounds great until you realize how truly futile it is to use. Firstly, what is the point in shipping six soldiers? It takes less time for you to produce those and in the long run, six soldiers are not going to carry you very far or even set you back. There is also no point in shipping supplies or villagers as they can be quickly produced back home. The only useful cards were 'Factory' and 'Fort' because these two powerful buildings could not be built, only imported.

The crux of the game is management. It is your typical RTS game. You start out with a Town Center and several villagers who can be assigned to gather one of three resources (Coin, food and wood) or to build structures. There is a population limit that can be expanded by building houses. You also have the option of advancing your current 'Age' at the Town Center which grants you access to more buildings and units as well as upgrading the style of your buildings. Overall, the basic RTS elements are handled fairly well and I cannot fault them. Expanding on that, AoE 3 introduces the concept of explorers. The explorer is very powerful unit that each race starts with. He has the ability to collect treasures and build trading posts. This makes him very useful scout early on the game seeing as he cannot be killed. When he dies you have to pay coin to have him resurrected. The game also allows you to start trading links with Native American civilizations from both North and South America. If you build a trading post in one of their camps, they will allow you to recruit some of their soldiers as your own as well as allow you to access special research bonuses that are not available anywhere else. In my opinion, this was an excellent mechanic.

The plot of this game is nonsense. Sure it does make sense but it really doesn't fit into American history. I am not very clued up with the history of America very much but even I can tell that this game is a travesty. You follow the exploits of three different generations of the Black family as they face changing times. All three chapters are completely separate stories set in different time zones. My main complaint was that instead of allowing you to play actually history, you are somehow playing alongside the action. I found myself leading a young woman into battle against a railroad company. That is just how poor the story pans out. What is the point in being historically accurate if you are going to look for a fountain of youth or introduce boring pirates as main characters. The main story does not even feature, Russians, Dutch, Portuguese or even Spaniards even though they feature on the box. I was very disappointed with the story in general as well. Not only is it loaded with hard to believe stereotypes, but it is extremely predictable as well. You can probably figure out what is going to happen next with ease. Historically lacking, predictable and boring. These are the only words I can use to describe the plot.

There is a fair amount of reply value in the form of multiplayer. The Campaign also offers three difficulty settings but I did not want to suffer through the plot again. The servers are fairly lag-free and that, coupled with an amazingly intricate ranking system make the Multiplayer a great experience. There is a large variety of game types as well as a few dozen maps. The multiplayer really shines for this game.

Overall, this game is not remarkable. It is an above average RTS game but has a poor plot and mediocre sound. Ultimately, it does not live up to the likes of Starcraft and Total Annihilation even though it contains a very good multiplayer system and some amazing graphics. The Home City concept is not very useful and the historical accuracy of the game is lacking. Buy it if you want another RTS game but you'd be better off with Starcraft or Warcraft 3. Blizzard never go wrong.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/09/08

Game Release: Age of Empires III (EU, 11/04/05)