Empire Earth

"A game that could have had so much more..."

Empire Earth, created by the same people who created the incredibly Ages Of Empires Series. People, including myself, were expecting a whole lot more from this game than what was given.

Simply put, the game is about history. You start of in the early greek/Stone Age, and evolve your people to the years beyond ours. From simple cavemen throwing rocks at eachother, to giant cyborgs wrestling it out on a lone island. Sounds very exciting, and I was anticipating it, thinking it had more than I expected. But sadly, a game with the innovativeness as this fell short.

GRAPHICS: 10/10
Don't get me wrong, the graphics on Empire Earth are superb. Far away, everything looks real. The trees sway with the wind, the little plants blow with the wind. People walking around, doing their duties. But, up close, everything is blocky, and people suffer from ''I have a square body!'' syndrom. The water affects are mediocre, nothing special.

GAMEPLAY: 6/10
The gameplay is done wrong. A strategy has one basic premise usually: Destroy the enemy base. In a campaign mode, its usually aquire an object, kill a person, or migrate there. But in Empire Earth, it's done wrong.

First, no matter what, everyone is the same race. Except when one person is in a higher or lower era. The only difference is technology, and the nations you choose. Some nations will have better Civilians, some better warriors, etc. But most of the time, they are only useful for one era. I mean, who wants to have horseman against giant cyborgs?

More flaws come in planes. The warplanes, bombers, and planes like that are flawed in flying. They all have fuel gauges, while realistic, take a large sum of money to invest in, and usually aren't worth it after 2 or so eras. The fuel also is flawed. For example, if they are a few game screens away from the airport and run out of fuel, they just simply fly back, even with no fuel.

Another flaw in planes is that the are incredibly hard to control. They swirl around in mid air, and are very slow, easy targets to hit.

The ground troops aren't as flawed as planes, but still have major problems. Who is going to use infantry against panzer tanks? The tanks are fast, and hard to kill, and are basically uber infantry. Before tanks come by, the ground units are mostly swords and spears. But, again, who is going to use spearmen when they have horses?

A way that ground units are tryed to be fixed up is the Rock Paper Scissors esque weaknesses. Rock beats scisssors, scissors beats paper, and paper beats rock. AKA Sword beats bow, bow beats spear, spear beats sword, or something like that. But it only takes affect in the earlier parts of the game.

Later in the game, when cyborgs become available, thats all that you will most likely use. They dominate everything, when used in the right combination. Very unbalanced.

Ship battle is one of the few unflawed areas. Again, they run on the Rock/Paper/Scissors affect, and it balances them out. The one problem is that the ship AI is incredibly stupid.

Another Flaw/Addition is the ability to build heroes in different eras. But if the hero never dies, he stays with you. So you can have a hero from the early eras survive to the cyborg eras, it's awkward. A little guy with a spear Vs. The giant flying cyborg? Also, this leads to multiple heroes sometimes.

SOUND: 1/10
Sounds in strategy games are never anything exciting. An explosion here, a scream there. Ambient sounds are the 1 point this game gets. Tree's swaying and water, mostly.

MUSIC: 4/10
Again, strategy games never have exciting music. The one cool feature is that the music changes according to what is going on. Calm when you are gathering and building, fast when the enemy rushes your base.

REPLAY: 0/10
Flawed, boring, only worth one play, if even. The game never adds anything fun. There are other secret objectives in campaign, but they are usually incredibly obvious. You see an enemy stronghold that isn't listed as an objective, blow it up.

STORYLINE: 0/10
Go read a history book.

Rent Or Buy?
You can't rent a computer game to the best of my knowledge. Buy it if you are a history buff and love stragety games.

OVERALL: C
Could have been done better.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/22/02, Updated 07/01/03