Empire Earth III

I can see why after playing all three that #3 is considered to be the worse. It dumbed down virtually everything and turned the campaign into a game of essentially real time risk. By itself it is a good game. However, with the name empire earth...its just not very...empire earth. examples of things #3 has dumbed down. factions: they have been boiled down to 3, all the civilizations have been boiled down to 3 with different bonuses. You have western, middle eastern, and far eastern/asian. that is it. campaign: as i said earlier its been dumbed down to just a risk style game board with rts battles. resources: depending on your outlook this can be a good or bad thing. for example in the other games you could have up to like 6-8 resources to juggle. here you only really have 2 trade: it dumbed down trade, you could always trade with yourself but the way its handled now has been dumbed down, its done market to city center instead of market to market. roads: they dont exist. in 2 roads where actually the prefered terrain type of all ground units. they would literally follow the roads exactly the way they were built. an these roads gave a massive speed boost so it encouraged good road building over all, by itself its not a bad game but if you are expecting another empire earth you are going to be massively disappointed.

This game is an insult to the Empire Earth series. If it was at least PLAYABLE, that would be something. This game crashes and corrupts save data like it was DESIGNED to do so. It's infuriating. It just crashes randomly. When it autosaves, it might crash. When it crashes, it might just corrupt your save data. I don't mean the one you saved yourself. I don't mean the last autosave. I mean EVERY SINGLE AUTOSAVE on top of MY save file is corrupted. What in the actual F$%# is that?! Again, this is just the basic functionality of the game. If you want to get into the design of it, it's ALSO a very badly designed game. Let's run through it very quickly: -Poor pathfinding, targeting, and general movement, especially ships. Units often walk away from targets -14 Distinct epochs are now 5 eras. BOOOO! -Endless civilization customization is gone. It's just 3 stilted factions. Vaguely unique playstyles but, BOO! -Voices are SO stereotypically brutal to hear. They will make your ears bleed. -Hard CPU gives about as much resistance as a wet paper bag. I thought since it was on Steam, they might have taken even a few minutes to address some of the basic issues with the crashing and save corruption. But NOPE. Still a core function. This game is the absolute worst. Waste of time and money.

To explain for people unfamiliar with this game why there are so many negative reviews. Empire earth is sort of age of empires adjacent in regards to gameplay, it had it's own spins on the formula but that was it's core. But for this game they decided to grab a bunch of features that were popular or new at the time and smash them all together. You no longer pick from a variety of different nations instead they went more asymmetric with only 3 factions, west, east, and middle east and they reduced the historical ages down from more then a dozen to just 5. They also decided to remove all resources such as wood, stone, iron, or food and mash them all into a single resource called raw materials and gold can now only be gained by trade caravans instead of mining. In later ages the game even gives up unit variety to 1 or 2 unit types per building. And they removed all the historical campaigns to boot. Combine all of that with the fact that it had a buggy release and only ever received a singular patch a few days after release and you have a recipe for disaster. The path finding struggles with even small groups of units and the AI even on Hard can sit there and do nothing for an entire game. This game managed to kill the franchise to this day. If this wasn't an Empire Earth game this would of probably just went down as a mediocre RTS but because it was supposed to be the next entry to an existing franchise this was unacceptable. It also doesn't help that they tried making the unit dialogue humorous and memorable but even half an hour in I found the lines wearing at me and the parade of different accents left me struggling to figure out what some of them were even saying. A bit funnily to me looking at it more while writing this review I think what this game took the most inspiration from is a cult classic game I love called Rise of Legends. Three asymmetric factions with two being western and middle eastern themed, only 2 resources for you to balance that are respectively gathered from nodes or from trading with cities, neutral sites that let you recruit special units if you defeat their guardians, a strategic map that lets you specialize regions to produce a handful of resources including wealth, troops, and research. And Rise of Legends came out a full year before this game.