Empire Earth

"Spartacus? Is that you?"

Strategy games on the PC are as common as having a mouse and keyboard these days. With constant games flowing through the stores and onto the desktops of PC’s everywhere, it’s hard to differentiate what is good and what isn’t. Empire Earth attempts to create its own little niche in the genre, and ends up with several different themes that are essentially like everything else that you’ve played before. Where it comes to presentation and even the amount of history that is involved with the first few campaigns throughout the game, there is some truth and some dramatic qualities. Regardless, Empire Earth is worthy of playing if you’re looking to sink your teeth into the strategy and real time games, but are sick of War Craft and Star Craft.

Re-Write History And The Future…

Empire Earth has a couple of shining points to it that give you the ability to play through several different civilizations and scenarios that range from the Roman empire to the futuristic Russian lands of robotic warfare. Once you’ve actually sat down with the game, you’ll find that each of the scenarios have several different goals that you have to accomplish, whether it falls in the line of creating a city or guarding a single leader. Units and other various weapons come in many forms depending on the time frame that you’re playing in, but you’ll have several different implements of destruction at your fingertips regardless of where and when you are.

The key to this is to have your workers find and harvest just enough of the resources that will allow you to build bigger and better units to send into battle. A challenging computer will constantly test your skills throughout, so you might want to practice on the random maps for a while before trying to tackle a human opponent. You have to be careful though, because the computer is exceptionally skilled at rolling over you. With the different difficulty levels, you can make your game easy or extremely hard, though the recommendation is simply to start out easy and work yourself into a heavy battle. A scenario editor allows you to create your own maps and terms to play with and even play with online against other Empire Players. This is probably one of the more interesting parts of the game, and you’ll find that with enough thought and creativity, your map can be used on the Net to not only battle, but recreate some of the more interesting sequences.

As you progress through the game, the ability to play random maps is what you will need to do in order to practice. With the addition of citizens that can keep your stockpiles high, you also have to worry about defenses against your opponents and the weapons that they bring with them. Building onto the game is the addition of the Epoch, which allows you to change ages at the simple click of a button. When you get into the different time frames, you’ll be given different units that you can build as well as different buildings and creations that can help you greatly in later battles. One of the best features is that the additions of different wonders allow you to work in different aspects in a God-like fashion that wasn’t readily available before. You’ll find these additions to be helpful and cool to mess with, though they do happen to take forever to create.

The interface that you have at your disposal really isn’t all that hard to work with, and most of what you have is done with a simple right click of the mouse. Directing troops through the battlefield takes little more than ten minutes of practice and all of the different elements in the game play are explained in a training mode. Once you’ve gotten good enough with the mouse, then you can assign numerous hotkeys to speed up your playing. These come in handy when trying to get numerous characters and units to move in the direction that you want them to. Probably the most impressive part of the control is that you can stack up units and then send them out on an all out destructive wave with a simple click of the button, allowing you to keep working on your civilization.

Unleash Hell…

When you look at the visual presentation of Empire Earth, you’ll find that there are some pretty interesting designs and animations for your armies and your holdings in general. Workers will swing axes at trees and drag meat from freshly slain animals to a town center. All of these small details add into the really epic battle sequences that can have up to hundreds of units fighting at once with little or no slow down. When you go through the different ages, you’ll also find that the game includes differences in the way that the buildings look and even the units and how they upgrade from the previous age. All of these details with the scenario cut-scenes really make up for a visually impressive game as long as your video card can handle it.

Symphony Of The Ears…

There are some really good pieces of music that you’ll find in Empire Earth and most of the really good pieces that you find will be in the earlier campaigns such as the Roman and English portions of the game. This is not to say that the rest of the music should be left out, but there is nothing that captures the true magnitude of a war happening on the screen other than symphonic music with hundreds of swordsmen going blood hungry on you. The sound effects are also of excellent quality, and you’ll find that the game offers you plenty of speech and small snips of sound that give you the overall feeling of being in command. Hearing subordinates hail you as Lord or Master really does have an impact on just how involved in the game you want to be.

Show Me The Art Of Conquest…

Empire Earth is a good stepping stone before you move onto the expansion pack, Art of Conquest. Where this game gives you plenty of options on what to do and how to fight, Conquest goes one step further and allows you to see and play through a mildly different set of campaigns. If you’re into the strategy games that allow you to really unleash an army of epic proportions and be able to create a strong environment, then you’ll find that Empire Earth is worthy of your time and your money. With exceptional game play, good visuals and awesome audio as well as a standard control interface that is easy to use, there is no reason not to give this one a run around on the computer screen.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/09/03, Updated 02/09/03