Empire *not really* EARTH! The premise is strong! The gameplay is weak.
User Rating: 6 | Empire Earth PC
It had to have been the most disappointing thing to realize how marred a game is by its technical flaws or limitations, when its presentation is so well conceived you almost want to believe its a great game. Which is not to say its a bad game, or an uninteresting idea, or a boring real time strategy game; but the more its magnified the more revealing Empire Earth's rough edges are in retrospect. Honestly, with all the direction behind such a project you'd have thought that Stainless Steel Studio's would've initially presented something much more unique than the finished project. However, some things don't go as planned or just plain don't make sense. What we got was a strangely unfinished, unbalanced and glitchy age of empires with half the polish and perhaps worst of all- the most susceptible type of game to age poorly. Which it did.. terribly. It utilized a seemingly proprietary real time strategy system that consisted of frighteningly long matches against CPU and online players alike, eternally slow resource collection, broken military formations, horrendously embarrassing path finding even for the time it was released, and a pathetic often ridiculous combat logic that ended in more frustration than gleeful enjoyment. Unless of course you enjoy micro-managing your units to death, its hard to have a lot of fun throughout honestly. You'll always be waiting too. Waiting to have the resources to build up an unsure military defense or more villagers or more defensive structures. Did I mention defending yourself enough? That's really all your going to be doing if you want to be as good as the AI in this game since you never really know how big the enemies army is and your line of sight is pretty tiny in the early epochs. The AI I might add that starts with more resources to compensate for the weaknesses in their own problematic tendencies that will often have you scratching your head was pretty much my first problem. For example they usually build three to even six guard towers around one type of resource when you still only have two. From further observation I've come to realize they always have a small army five minutes to seven minutes into any game, a small navy before you and seemingly know exactly where you are on the map. Now all these frustrations aside, all the technology and progression your civilization makes throughout the various epochs is nothing short of truly amazing, ambitious, historical and lastly quite epic. Yet, like most things that sound and look really cool in premise they tend to very easily have their problematic areas picked apart. Really its problems with execution rather than any premises Empire Earth tried to convey for itself. Like how the various Epochs are actually quite broad and nonsensical. Often they clump different time periods of units through history together under one epoch. Understandable, but really silly and obviously unrefined on purpose. All the detail you'd really want in a game like this- sadly just doesn't exist. Empire Earth really had a lot of potential, but the designers nerded out a bit when they were coming up with the whole thing and got caught up in the whole "it'll be like age of empires, but better" thing that was formerly "it'll be like command and conquer, but better" etc... They really could have just put something more defined and majestic together if they'd taken less pointers from other real time strategy games, but its not like it really matters now. Stainless Steel Studio's is gone anyway and the Empire earth series is pretty much craptastic now. Its hard to believe Rick Goodman worked on this project, since this may be the only game project he's ever been a part of that's only slightly less boring than everything else he's been involved with.
