The best looking, the most confusing list of changes made to the overall core game play.
User Rating: 6 | Empire Earth II PC
"This makes me feel miserable." It should've been the first words out of the mouths of frustrated fans of the original Empire earth everywhere. The simple real time strategy mechanics and economy system that was so well known from most Stainless Steel Studios games, had been completely thrown out the window. Boring is a really good word for it, sure their is plenty of depth, but depth without any drive to "want" to play a game is just depressing. The new engine looks great, but the weather cycle is merely eye-candy rather than an actual detriment to you're resource gathering, and creating infinite resources on a map are absolutely stupid. Half the time, as with most of the Empire Earth games, or those similar to them, the A.I. is up to the same ridiculous pattern. Expand early, build up far too many troops for you to handle while you're still setting up you're fledgling economy and then trample you as soon as possible. The problem here is that the overall gathering rate is too slow and too reliant on everything else i.e. food and wood. You need an awful lot of citizens to have an effective economy and it still takes an awfully long time to get anything done. The one comparison that I can make is Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. In which the gameplay is more akin to the first Empire Earth and plays better because of it. However, the A.I. is still a complete mess in both titles. Often building anywhere and everywhere. At times I feel like I'm playing against Total Annihilation's dimwitted computer players, constantly building on the map for no reason other than to complete their programming a.k.a. murder you with dozens of soldiers/ troops/ robots, etc. The problem with Empire Earth II is all the features that it swept under the rug that actually made the original game fun. The real time "strategy" worked in Empire Earth, because it didn't get bogged down by its resource system. Its sequel however, fumbles at every possible turn. "Tin?" What the hell do I need tin for? Infinite resources? Why would you ever need this in any game ever? I even thought the original had one too many resources i.e. gold and iron. It could've easily been condensed to fewer resources. Age of Empires one did this exceedingly well and its surprising, given the age of Empire Earth (having come out later) that its developers would completely throw away the idea of simplifying resource management and gathering. Then we move on to the music and sound. Sure, EE 2 looks mighty fine, a good engine although it doesn't run as reasonably well as it should when battles get heavy on the units even on modern computer hardware. The music is fairly generic though, nothing really interesting and certainly not memorable. Then all of a sudden it feels like an enormous step backwards the moment you hear a single utterance from you're troops or villagers. Its like they heard some voice acting from a few amateur VA's and said "This is it- we've found our muses. This is going to send us into the stratosphere with our hopefully award winning game." Now I'm not saying any of the Stainless steel studios games had "great" voice acting for their units, but this one feels pretty cheesy. Pretty bland, stupid dialogue are what you'll be putting up with every time a unit freaking moves or is clicked. Its terrible and its unnecessary for a game this far from its sequel to actually sound worse than its other games. Its no wonder this series is over with, they never stuck with a familiar gameplay system to work with. Empire Earth III being the premier of "terrible" design choices and overall lack of care or interest. Its pretty obvious these days that their are much better choices than Empire Earth II. Its predecessor is still more fun and holds up a hell of a lot better. The fact that fan niche appeal has kept the second game alive is not surprising. People like something about it that simply doesn't appeal to the people that enjoy other resource gathering strategy games. Should it sit in its own defunct genre by now? Yes. Yes it should.
P.S. Why is it that villagers make the dialogue that their attacking when merely hunting llamas? That's retarded.
