One of the best RTS games out there.
First off, the graphics are easily the best and nothing comes close right now. The resolution goes up to 1600x1200; you will probably have to lower your details for the game to run smoothly. Right now I have an old sub 2.0GHZ Pentium with a 4200TI NVIDIA graphics card, and I can run the game at 1600x1200 on low detail level without any problems. Also, the screen shakes when there’s a nice big explosion.
The story for this game is not bad. It’s basically saying that in the future humanity may be divided in to three factions: Those that give allegiance to a despotic government, a single powerful corporation, or a society of the elite. For the campaigns, I’ve only beaten the ED one so far, it pretty exciting to me.
The sound in this game is nothing special. The music is good and it is adaptive i.e. when you attack or come under attack, the music changes.
The game-play is excellent, and this is what really made me buy it. There are so many features that I don’t even know where to start. For one thing, you can customize your units, i.e. outfit your tanks with either lasers or armor piercing rounds or give that helicopter shields and rockets, etc. Everything also has a counter, but it’s not like some games where if your army doesn’t perfectly counter the other army you loose (otherwise it would be like Age of Empires, which is glorified paper scissors rock). Also, if you give the game’s interface a chance you will see that it is pretty efficient and lets you manipulate things easily such that it could turn someone who is not an RTS player in to an expert. For example, you can create an army, save it, give it a name (i.e. siege force), then later, all you have to do is click a button and it will create all the units to replicate that army as many times as you want. One other thing I should mention is that each of the races is VERY unique and it should keep the game fresh for a long time.
Like I said before, I recommend this for MOST RTS fans. Some people may not like it because it does not resemble whatever they may be used to and those people will probably never want to deviate from old formulas. Earth 2160 is different from say War Craft 3 or Age of Empires. You need both micro manage skills and large army creating skills. In skirmishes, even if it looks like you're loosing, keep your head cool and you can still manage to win. Also, the RTS genre may not be for you, if all you do is play soccer games on your computer.
Last thing, there are some problems like units that have auto-prone but they don’t un-prone and sometimes units will continue to attack something that is not attacking them while something else is. Very minor, and nothing they can’t patch. I have not faced any bugs or have had any crashes.
I mostly agree with Jason Ocampo’s review but I gave this game 9.0 because I consider graphics and game-play much more important than other factors. I realize that nowadays games must be extremely refined in all areas to get a 9.0 but Earth 2160 gives you a lot of gaming for the dollar and it looks like a classic.