Empire Earth

"Empire Earth Reveiw"

Empire Earth is a very good Real Time Strategy game. The major thing that sets it apart from most other rts games is that it covers 500,000 years of history. From prehistoric man to 200 years in the future.

If you are familiar with RTS games it shouldn't be to hard to get used to. You won't necessarily need to look at the tutorials to play the game but I would recommend trying them first so you can fully utilize the games special features. If you haven’t played Rts games the tutorials are a good introduction to the genre and are designed very well. They make it easy to learn how to play the game.

The story line is pretty easy to follow and is interesting but it could have been more interesting. The actual levels are very fun to play and it is very satisfying to win. They are full of action and their is a wide variety of stuff to do. Each level is unique so it doesn’t get boring after you beat a few of them. Each one of the civilizations in the campaigns has its own unique qualities so you will need to adjust to the new civilization when you start a new campaign.

The music is pretty good and it fits in with the levels but it does get somewhat annoying eventually. The voice acting could use some work. It needs more emotion and pizzazz. The voice acting is one of the only major faults with the game. The graphics look good from afar but if you zoom in all the way everything looks very strange. (It is almost impossible to play the game zoomed in so this shouldn't be a problem except during the movies before and after each scenario. I tried playing a level zoomed in and it was nearly impossible.)

The game play is pretty smooth most of the time. All the units do what their supposed to do and are easy to handle. It has the standard ctrl + # grouping system where you highlight a group of units press ctrl and a number to assign the units to the number. You can easily see your groups at the bottom. Building is easy and all the tasks are set up so it is easy to understand. The only real problem is that sometimes during the in game movies it doesn’t reset to the previous zoom rate and you are zoomed in 100%. If you have a mouse with a scroll bar just turn the scroll bar to fix it. This problem occurred on my computer but I don’t know if it occurs on others. Perhaps one of the patches fixes it. (If you don’t have a scroll bar on your mouse go to the video options and there is an option you can press that will fix this. I think it is something like reset picture but I’m not sure. I don’t think this option was meant specifically for this purpose so it might do something else.) Other than this I would say overall the game is pretty easy to use.

The game has lots of replayability because it has a scenario editor and a ransom map generator. I would definitely recommend buying it. Download the demo if you’re not sure.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/05/03