This game will kill your love for the Empire Earth series.
EE3 is a bastardization of the Empire Earth series, as much of a bold, new direction for the series as Cardigan's bold charge against the Russians was for the British campaign in the Crimean War.
There is very little that can be said is "innovative," the gameplay is ridiculously simple for today's RTS standards, and the emphasis on cutting-edge graphics make this a game that only the best of the best gaming platforms can handle – although even if you could afford to spend that much money on a PC, you still wouldn't want to throw away $50 on EE3.
We start with the game's mechanics. To build EE3, the folks at Mad Doc took its predecessor's engine apart to rebuild it into something "new." The outcome has been the same as though a five-year-old were given a monkey wrench, a top-of-the-line engine, and then told to go nuts. Other than the World Domination mode – which is not a new feature to this genre, thanks to Rise of Nations – there is not a whole lot of "newness" to the game. In fact, there's a lot of wanting for the old game.
Gone are special resources, because gone are most of the epochs; gone are exciting battles between the Incas and the Koreans because gone are specific civilizations in favor of customizable template civilizations, Western, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern, which really all play the same way – interestingly enough, the Mesoamericans are completely unrepresented, so while there is a "Western" civilization, initially defined by Western Europe, the Western Hemisphere is effectively absent from the game.
Gone is the feeling that you are marching through history. You can run through the five epochs – Ancient, Medieval, Colonial, Modern, and Future – without breaking a sweat. In World Domination, you are particularly cheated in that, if you manage to take a research-specialized province early enough and hold onto it, you can find yourself in the Future epoch really before you have an empire under your belt.
Gone is an AI that makes you sit up and pay attention. In skirmish games, the AI builds up what any human player would turn into a war-machine-gone-force-of-nature, but the AI will never pose a serious threat. In World Domination mode, the AI seems to be even worse, just when you thought it couldn't possibly so. Many, many battles end before they begin because the AI's initial force, workers and all, will just charge your force and be annihilated. And, once again, when the AI does get to base building, it never builds up a terribly large force to threaten you.
Gone is stability. This is one of the few games I have reviewed with fewer than 80 hours of it under my belt, because for every 10 minutes of having the game open – not playing, mind you, just having it open, I would have a CTD or other error that would cause me to close out (or shut down) and try again. Post-patch, the ratio between minutes and crashes improved considerably – maybe 30:1 – but not sufficiently enough to warrant extended gameplay.
With so little of the underlying game left, everything else that Mad Doc has attempted gives you the sense of putting additional floors on a building with a cracked foundation. However, we move on to the gameplay, or lack thereof.
Despite the promise of customizable civilizations in order to make up for the distinct lack of unique civilizations, the tech trees seem to march along very similar paths from one game to the next, and the rock-paper-scissors approach to combat does not make the units feel part of any unique system.
Unit management is so poorly handled that going to battle in EE3 is more like a doing your chores than playing a game. First, there is no suicide function to allow you to dispose of useless units that are draining your population cap; therefore, you will often find yourself going to battle with woefully inappropriate units that, if the AI were any better, would spell defeat each and every time. Pathfinding is simply atrocious, which means that you have to suffer through terrible, terrible voice acting as you click over and over again to get your units to go where you want them to.
Honestly, why is the knight such a coward? I like "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" just as much as any geek out there, but I don't want an army full of Sir Robins, thank you very much, Mad Doc.
World Domination is ridiculously oversimplified. Whereas the game promised a kind of sandbox approach, each province practically comes with a label to tell you whether or not it should be a military, imperial, commerce, or research province. And, frankly, there just aren't enough provinces to make any kind of worthwhile strategy. Granted, when you're cruising through epochs before you can even really build an empire because of your almighty research provinces, it's easier to complain that there are too many provinces, but if Mad Doc had really wanted to make the effort to make a sandbox conquest mode, a better sense of variety would have been nice.
The tribal quests in World Domination mode become headaches after a while, and playing through them I felt like the tribes were the almighty empire and I their vassal. I mean, how else does one explain the Vikings having buried treasure in Africa of they aren't a world-conquering Empire?
EE3 feels like it was trying to compete with Rise of Nations in the way that EE2 should have – as much as I love EE2, I admit to liking Rise of Nations more – and failing horribly. It has an inferior conquest mode, a worse sense of tactics in skirmish mode, and very little uniqueness.
Finally, the graphics, while cool, demand far too much of any platform a casual gamer might have – and since EE3 was clearly stripped down to the bare bones in terms of gameplay to be accessible by casual gamers, this is a bad thing.
System Requirements Lab tells me that my computer easily beats the recommended requirements for EE3, but even on the lowest settings, my machine struggled through even medium-sized battles. And, of course, playing the game on the lowest settings didn't allow me to appreciate all of the design work that Mad Doc put into EE3, so I can't really comment on how cool it looked compared to EE3. From what I was forced to look at, EE2 was far and away graphically superior to this game.
Empire Earth III has succeeded in killing the Empire Earth series for me. If you love Empire Earth, avoid this installment at all costs, even the Super Christmas Bargain Bin Sales Mark Down! cost this game will sport in a few years' time.