Empire Earth

"Wow. Thats a Lot of Game."

Intro:

After Age of Empires II had sort of passed on, fans of the game were really wanting a little more. So, along comes this game. Empire Earth. Little was known about this game except that the designer of Age of Empires was in on it and that it would cover a bit more time periods than AoE. And, of course, they UNDER exaggerated this concept. Practically all 500,000 years of earth and beyond are put into this game. Saying this, I might add there are a few little flaws, but overall I was very impressed with this brilliant work of art. The art of combat, that is.

Graphics: 8/10

The graphics use a full 3D engine. However, the characters are similar to those of Goldeneye, in that they are ugly in the face due to textures, any they are somewhat blocky. Still, you can capture any vertical camera angle. I can't say the same horizontally because the camera cannot rotate. While sad, it doesn't seem to take away from the rest of the game. Anyway, the buildings look great, and while the blood could look more suffering, I am satisfied with the graphics.

Sound: 8/10

The developer dudes did a great job of coming up with a soundtrack that could represent all eras in time. The voices of the citizens and the soldiers change from age to age, so there will never be a time where you will kill yourself if you hear that noise one more time.

Game play: 9/10

The big meat of the game tastes great. The are chunk of scenarios for you to complete and you may never get tired of random map mode. There are those things where you wish you could go inside the game and fix it.

In random map mode, you start out as a custom civilisation in most likely the stone age, set with a certain number of citizens to build stuff and gather resources. The more resources you gather, the more soldiers and citizens you can create and the higher your technology will be, as well as buildings. Gathering resources is the one thing I wish I could change. If you want a resource like, lets say iron, that wasn't near your town, you had to set up a whole camp just for that iron. And, to make it worse, only six people can hack away at the block of 300,000 iron at a time, which means you gotta get a hold of some more iron, even though you have way more than enough in that block. Your enemies have no problem with this system, because they tend to get right to work on gathering resources and making more people. In order to win, you must use the instinct you were given to trick the computer. Its a very hard, messy battle between you and your enemy, but the action and strategy really ways it out to be a blast.

Overall: 9/10

For the twenty bucks a payed for this game, I definitely think it was worth it. How often do you find a RTS game with all of the history shoved into it? Its a great experience, and if you love strategy, I would suggest you put your humanity skills to the test in one jam packed game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/19/05