2 stars (Splendid graphics, but...) - Ok, I'll start with the graphics. I have high end PC (AMD 64-bit 3500+, Radeon X800XT 256mb, S-ATA Western Digital, 2 GB RAM) and there were no troubles with running the game at highest settings. The game is really beautiful - there are flying birds, crocodiles, the terrain is funny when you zoom on it. But for me this is the only good thing in the game. For example, why the **** you need that animated traveling steam engine? It does not change anything in the game. Only increases the lag in the game... You have many nations to choose from, but the final result is the same upgrades, almost the same units. I and one mate of me played the game over the LAN. He was with the Russians, me with the English guys. Practically, the only difference was that the Russians speak in Russian... I don't think that having the home town is big advantage. About the maps - I did not find random generated maps, which for me is big issue. I want to play every time on different maps. This gives me much more fun than to play on a map that I already know. And finally, when I wanted to uninstall the game it took me a lot of time just waiting to initialize uninstalling process. The whole process took about 3 minutes! In general the game lost the feeling of its predecessors. I don't feel it like AoE II. BTW, the same is with the EA II. For me much better are AoE II and the first EA. So, I'm going to sell my copy of AoE III and keep playing Empires Dawn of the Modern World.
4 stars (Not bad at all!) - I was a little antsy about picking up this title. A lot of the reviews are extremely mixed and offered up a wide variety of pros and cons for this game. I became a hard boiled fan of AOE1 way back when it first came out and you'd often find me facing off with friends via LAN while my Phonecian war elephants ran amok through their ranks. AOE2 was even better, allowing better tactics for your infantry and cavalry as well as great seige equipment and castles. So what new suprises lurk in AOE3?
Well, the most obvious one that comes to mind is of course your home city. Bear in mind that this game takes place during the Imperial years, when the different nations of Europe began looking for new countries to colonize overseas. Your home city is more or less like your "sponsor", providing you with regular upgrades to your army, navy, and settlers. Constructing buildings, finding special landmarks, and killing enemies acrue experience points, and after accumulating so many you'll hit pre-determined points where you can cash them in for free shipments from your home city. Some of these can take the form of military units or raw materials, and sometimes buildings. After getting a whole lot of experience points your city goes up in level and you can buy items called "cards". Said "cards" can be built into a deck (kind of like a weird Magic:The Gathering thing) of free military units and upgrades which you can customize to the environment you wish to fight in. For instance, as the Dutch my military tends to be strong on skirmishers and naval units, so by buying the right cards I can hire a group of skirmishers to go over to my colony for free. Likewise I can send a large fort to help protect my frontiers. By saving up for the really good cards I can hire privateers to raid enemy shipping.
Indiginous native tribes (nicely done, each tribe is map specific. Fighting in old Carolina you'll ally with Cherokee; in the Yukon it'll be the Nootka tribe, etc. You'll learn to love/hate the Iriqouis Mantlet unit) can be allied with to give you even more unit flexibility and upgrades. Even more there are "trade routes" and if you set up trading posts along these routes you regularly gain free exp everytime the trade cart comes by. If you reach the proper levels you can upgrade the simple travois trade system to a stagecoach, and ultimately to a locomotive system, getting you exp even faster. Needless to say the trade routes are highly sought after in any game and add a nice touch to the overall experience.
Military units are often nation-specific and that too is a great touch to this game. I love sending large groups of Veteran Ruytens (Dutch cavalry armed with pistols) on raids against enemy settlers. The Russians have a specialized artillery called the War Wagon, basically a cannon encapsulated in a coach that gets pulled around the battlefield (and wreaks serious havoc, let me tell you). The Ottomans have cool rocket artillery that they can lay down surprisingly ferocious assaults with. These units are again nation-specific and make me want to try out a number of these different empires to see firsthand what the strengths and weaknesses are.
On the domestic side Settlers, your basic jack-of-all-trades unit, can do the standard resource gathering. Mines, trees, and herds of animals to hunt are sprinkled liberally over most mapsets. If you run out of resources on a particular map there are still options to continue this resource building via the construction of Mills (food) or Plantations (gold). Should you choose to buy the Factory card (highly recommended) you can freely harvest any resource in the game at the touch of a button.
Online play is offered via Ensemble's own gaming net, kind of like Battlenet but with a few less frills. Network lag is an issue with most games I've played in. It's a lot of fun going head to head with human players and many games will turn almost into bedlam with lots of mass attacks, feints, and artillery displays that will leave most gasping for air.
There are some drawbacks to the game though. While you can arrange your armies into formations once the fighting starts they seldom hold it and often scatter in different directions. For instance, while my skirmishers and artillery tend to hold the line reasonably well I can expect my Halberdiers (guys wielding massive, hard-hitting polearms) and often my cavalry to just run amok and get picked off singly. This is sadly compounded by the limited view you have of the map. When your army starts to spread out too thin you'll spend far too much time trying to redirect them back into formation, and all too often having them do so gets them shot in the back as they amble back into ranks at half speed. Were there the option to zoom out just a *little* bit this would alleviate many combat issues. In addition to this problem there's also an issue I have with artillery. You can order them to attack a certain enemy position or building but oftentimes after the first salvo they'll fire independently at random targets. While sometimes this isn't bad, like when they're being charged by a squadron of Hussars they'll sometimes fire at these incoming threats. Other times they continue bombarding a small building oblivious to the line of Pikemen coming over the rise with cannon-killing fervor in their eyes.
Still this is a fantastic game. It took a little getting used to to be sure, but I have found myself pleasantly addicted to this great game and I'm already looking for more. :)
2 stars (What a Disappointment!) - I've been waiting for Age of Empires 3 for several years. My wife and I are avid fans of AOE2 and we were really looking forward to Age of Empires 3 every since we heard about it a year ago. Unfortunately, Age of Empires 3 is half-baked and appears to have been rushed out the door for the Christmas shopping season. There are many flaws with this game and overal I give it a poor rating. It's unfortunate that Ensemble didn't listen to their customers or learn from their successess on earlier titles such as Age of Mythology, Rise of Nations and of course Age of Empires 2. It could have been great if they had spent the necessary time and effort working on it.
The major flaws include: The economy has been greatly simplified making the build-up simple and taking the fun out of trying to maximize resources. Combat is simplistic and boring. Formations are useless because the moment a battle starts the fighting units immediently abandon them like an untrained army. AOE2's combat was MUCH better. The panning and zooming need serious work. They make you dizzy and hinder game play. There are only three difficulty settings (Easy, Moderate and Hard). Almost 2/3rds of the screen is taken up with controls leaving a smaller area to view the action than similar games. Changing to a higher resolution improves the sharpness of the graphics, but doesn't change the amount of screen taken up by controls. It feels like peering through a small porthole to see the action. The game is jerky / buggy on my 3Ghz Pentium 4. The programmers appear to have only had time to take care of the serious errors, and left the minor ones in to annoy customers.
The ONLY good part of this game is the graphics. They have been updated to match similar games on the market today. I recommend you wait until this game falls below $20 before buying it. I wish I could get my money back...
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