Empire Earth III Review

By Joe Haygood | December 9, 2007

The Empire Earth series has been around for awhile making decent looking and playing world building real time strategy games. With a steep learning curve and a lot of information to parse through as you are playing, the games can be a tough sell for newcomers. Developer, Mad Doc went about making Empire Earth III a bit easier to jump in and play, but at the sacrifice of everything that made the game so great in the first place.

Taking a whole new approach, no longer to you pick a country, and work on conquering the globe. Country selection is all gone, replace by more generic Western, Far East and Middle Eastern factions. While simplifying the sides to a more manageable three, it ends up taking away any sense of individuality, because tile sets seem to be rather bland at best, and no real distinguishing features, barring a few noticeable units like Elephant troops and the like. The Middle East units are a bit different from the rest due to their ability to move buildings from one place to another, but it just feels the same no matter what side or era you are playing.

World Domination presents you with a globe and a starting point to conquer before trying to take over the world. From your starting point, you move throughout the world, looking at a breakdown of stats on each piece of the globe. Yes, that is correct; you no longer invade countries, but regions. You get a slate of stats that tell you the basics about each region. You find out how industrious, diplomatic and their war strength, but nothing with any tangible meaning. It is upsetting, because one of the things that make other games great in this genre is the wealth of information you receive on the areas you will invade. It will help players that are not accustomed to latching on to a lot of information, but it hurts the player that has been faithful to the series.

Putting aside those issues, once you start building your empire, the game starts to become a lot more enjoyable. Building units and so forth is just as easy as making a few clicks. Putting together a good base with solid defenses does not take too much time and I had the most fun with trying to figure out the best layout for my buildings in regard to attack routes. Amassing an army will not take much time, and once you get enough units, you can move out to attack your opponent, and watch the irritation begin anew.

I built up a group of about 50 assorted soldiers, archers, trebuchets, and the like and basically stormed my way across the map, enduring some of the worst path finding ever put into a game. You will have to guide your troops in baby steps across the map, because they will get stuck at every rock, every stream and any other place you can think of. If there is a geological formation that sticks out of the ground, your units will find a way to get stuck, which immediately takes you out of the game. And since it seems that your opponent is lackadaisical in building up a formidable army, you will have almost no trouble beating your opponent into submission, if you ever get your units across the map.

Battle sequences look fantastic, and you have the ability to zoom in right above the action to watch the ensuing bloodshed. The animations of the units is really well done, fitting in a lot of small details that most will never notice unless they zoom in to watch ever moment of the battle. The color palette is a wash however, as it always feels so ugly. Your units only seem to carry two colors at a time and they are all super bright, taking away from what you would think a normal army would wear to battle. The terrain is beautiful, and offers tons of geographical formations, like streams, waterfalls, mountains, hills and valleys. To enjoy all this beauty, you will need a good setup. Running the game on my laptop was an effort in futility as the game was a slideshow. Low end video cards either need not apply or make sure to turn the detail down as low as possible. Even with an 8800GT card, I occasionally received a message about running out of texture memory and lowering the detail.

All of your units will make sure to give you feedback on their feelings or progress. And this is about the point that you start looking for a way to impale your eardrums. The troops in this game repeat, continuously, the same phrases over and over, every time you click on them. And unlike a game like Warcraft, where you have a nearly endless supply of sharp witted remarks, these units here have about three phrases each and they will say one of them every time they get selected. Hearing your swordsman say