Age of Empires III

"Am I the only one who noticed the many flaws of this game?"

After what I considered an amazing Age of Mythology, the Age of Empires series returns to its original path, with the story (and civilizations available) covering from the "Age of Kings" timeline up to the 17, 18 century. However, this is exactly where the problems start. Covering what can be considered as one of the richest periods of the World's history, the story can be considered as quite boring and not covering the richness of that period at all.

Basically you will be playing across a campaign that includes only 3 acts, mainly only with English civilizations (which is a pity) and you will be narrated the story of 3 generations of the "Black" family as they battle against the plans of some sort of organization called "Circle". As far as I noticed, only around 3 of the missions on those 3 acts (which contain something like 30 missions overall) are based in real history, which isn't very nice, turning this into just another strategy game.

Well, but back to the game itself, despite some new (and interesting!) things being added to this one, some of the important features of the previous games seem to have disappeared. It seems you can no longer see the civilization charts as before, change the tactics of a group of attackers or even their basic strategy, like something as simple as ordering them to stay still all the time and don't pursuit any enemies as they flee.

The battles and gathering of resources are processed exactly as in the previous games, with your villagers (or whatever their name in this game is) being given the usual tasks, as collecting food, gold and wood. A new resource appears in this game, called "experience", which can is awarded by performing almost all possible types of actions in the field. This is then used to level up your "Home City" and grant your current civilization the ability to "order" new things from there

This is the most interesting addition to this game, the "Home City". It is a place which you can see before each battle and that you can customize (using your current points to buy new people or items to put in there), where you can buy new cards (1 level up in your city equals 1 point to spend around here)or equip the ones you have to your deck. The deck is a set of cards you can choose from whenever you get the opportunity to request something from your "Home City", and their effect may range from things like unique upgrades (which you can't get anywhere else) up to new units, passing from crates with resources or units that allow you to build a specific unit anywhere.

Apart from this new thing, no more new things can be seen in here. One of the most interesting things from the previous games was the ability to see historical notes about each unit that crosses your path, but in this game some problems arise from that section, as some data will prove to be incorrect, the are units which won't even feature the button to see their history, units with duplicate text in their history, among other types of bugs.

Glad to talk about bugs, as this game seems to feature a lot of them. Sometimes, if you try to skip a cut scene the game will just be stuck, so you will have to quit it. Killing one of your own units will award experience to an opponent civilization, some units can cross the graphics of others, the description for some upgrades isn't fully correct, incomplete voices when your characters speak on the cut-scenes, sometimes a "Are you sure you wanna kill that unit?" will appear but other times it won't, the online multiplayer isn't working at all times (I never actually tried it, but some people seem to have problems logging in), the trains make the game slower when they approach the end of their line and these are only some of the possible bugs you can find across your games.

Scrolling the screen, for some odd reasons, seems to be harder in this game than in the latest Age of Mythology, and I think I've spent more time trying to get the right view of the action than battling my foes.

Concerning modes, apart from the usual Campaign mode you also have a Multiplayer (online or by IP) mode, some more unimportant ones and a Skirmish mode, which unfortunately this time seems to feature only two types of battles, unlike the more than 4 featured in the last game.

About the replay value, if you actually like this game and ignore the many flaws it has, you may actually enjoy it a lot in the particular sense of this point, as getting your "Home City" to a good level may take weeks to complete, and you can then use your own personalizations of it to play online against hundreds of players across the world. However, most people say that this game is mainly for those people who play online, and I have to agree with them. Without online play, you would get fed up of the game in less than a week!

As for the graphics, at least for me they seemed worse than the ones in Age of Mythology, and I'm comparing this game to that specific one since it was the last game released before this one. Apart from the "a unit can gets inside another" graphical glitch that I already stated before, the train just "disappearing" of the map looks plain bad. Also, the graphics looks quit grainy sometimes, and their quality may disappointed not only fans of strategy games but also to those who liked the previous games.

The sound is nothing special, I mean, it is neither perfect nor bad, I would have to rate it as simply good. There are many songs to hear, but some of them will just put an idea of "I think I've already heard this before". The voices of the characters are simply perfect, and if you chose to play with the civilization you currently live in (for example, I played with the Portuguese since I live in Portugal) you can even get to hear them talking in your language, which is great, an amazing pearl I would have never imagined to be in this game!

Finally, who should get this game, you ask... If you don't have an Internet connection in the computer you are going to play this game, just forget about buying this. If you do AND you liked the Age of Empires series, give a try to demo version 1.1 and, if you indeed like it, then you should buy it!

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/01/05