Age of Empires III

"Greatest Strategy Game of the New Age"

Story/Campaign 9/10

Possibly one of the best campaigns in an RTS I have yet played. The story has been well thought out, following through the different ages. Each character has a voice actor. I thought the first two Age of Empire games didn't have much of a campaign, and focused mainly on the skirmishes. This one, however, focuses on not only skirmish, but its campaign as well. It is definitely a great improvement.

Gameplay 9/10

Not a great deal has changed since the second Age of Empires. You still need to collect resources, build armies and destroy your opponents. Your resources are Wood, Food and Coins. You may notice the disappearance of stone; I guess it was made redundant!

The battle and strategy aspect of the game is excellent. The game is well balanced with a wide variety of units. Most units have something they're powerful against. Pikemen, for example, you'd expect to be strong against cavalry, and so they are. Siege units are extremely useful in this game, having area effect damage and high damage they can do mad amounts of damage to any opponent.

The Home City is something which has been introduced. Whether you're in the campaign or skirmish, you're able to go to the home city screen and "order" supplies from your home city. You can order anything from food to musketeers. To control the balance of this great feature the developers introduced experience. After a certain amount of experience you're able to order something from your home city. Almost everything in the game rewards you with experience; collecting resources, destroying the enemy, building units etc.

Graphics 9/10

A great improvement since the last Age of Empires is the graphics. Everything has an incredible amount of detail. What I especially like is the physics. Objects react with the environment around them. When a cannon ball gets fired into a regiment of musketeers anything it hits gets knocked around accordingly.

Sound 8/10

Ah the intro music is back! It has been upgraded with a few extra instruments too :)
There are general sound effects, such as cannons firing, people accepting orders etc. But what's nice is that every main character in the story has a voice actor, acting out whatever they say.

Replayability

The game has variety of difficulty settings, the hardest of which is Expert. Fighting just one enemy AI on this setting is incredibly difficult. There's also an option called handicap which allows you to change how fast the player/computer gains resources. Of course what really keeps the player coming back to this game is multiplayer. Fighting against other players around the world can be an exciting thing with different strategies every game.

Conclusion

On the whole it's a very good game. It has everything I expected to be implemented, and more. It still has the feel of Age of Empires which is nice - that's why we like it right? There is of course still room for improvement. Technology is always advancing so the graphics could always be better.
There's a History section in the game, which I thought was a very nice idea. Almost everything in the game has some information about them, from the different ages to the units. The statistics of the units in the game reflects what they were like in real life - very nice.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/24/05