Empire Earth Review

As for the gameplay, there are quite a lot of aspects you can enjoy. After trying out all of the campaigns, I found that each scenario has an original concept, which maintains a great atmosphere. Throughout the scenarios you will be appointed individual tasks or quests that need to be carried out - like escorting a hero character to safety, destroying or locating a specified object, photographing a secret weapon of the enemy, and many more. The problem, however, is not in the variety of these assignments. Quite the opposite, you will have a lot of them and the game allows you to complete them in many different ways. Unfortunately, most of the missions are rather linear. Then again, the game doesn't have any restrictions in terms of movement, so if you wish to explore the world around you and forget the main mission, you may do so at any time. In spite of the somewhat linear approach taken in the scenarios, the frequent quests are there to slightly balance things out.

Wow, look at that gate crumble!

March to victory!!!

The next important thing that increases the quality of gameplay, is the way players can utilize diverse tactics in battle situations. Various features must be taken into account here. First and foremost, the player has to know exactly where to place which units and how to use their powers in the best possible way. For example, if you come up against a huge army that's been lead by a powerful enemy hero unit, there's a very slim chance of surviving; that is if you do not respond with a proper defense plan. The best thing to do in a situation like that, is to surround your hero with heavily armed units - then you maintain a tight formation and march straight into battle. Your hero will be protected from oncoming foes and, more importantly, he will be able to heal units at a faster rate. Otherwise, instead of bashing and slaying every living thing on the screen, the game permits more subtle ways of finishing a scenario such as: diplomacy, trade agreements, compensation of resources, etc. It's actually quite a useful and very effective method of wining a mission.

So, you've heard just about everything and at this point, you probably see no reason why you shouldn't play this game. Hear me out though, because there is the matter of path finding that we need to discuss still. In most situations, your units will appear rather confused and disoriented, instead of reacting normally to their instructions. I've noticed that the ships especially have peculiar ways of responding to a given command. For instance, you order a few battle-ships to keep the assigned formation and then you hit a certain target - consequently, they loose their formation and it takes them a long time to finally aim and fire at their objective. Land units take action more efficiently, even though they do tend to take unusual paths according to their own liking. Generally, the AI of the enemy units handles itself quite good. Sometimes, if the foes seem too difficult for you, you might want to construct special monuments, or the "Wonders of the World," that will give you immediate victory. That's just one of the ploys you can use against the enemy.

Whether you crave to participate in an accurate replay of the battle of Hastings or to involve yourself in the dangerous undertakings of the Red Baron, fundamentally Empire Earth will assure you hours and hours of great entertainment. If the abovementioned flaws happen to have disappointed you in any way, you still shouldn't pass up this game. The basic idea is to have fun with the cool aspects of the game (like casting calamities with your prophet and watching it destroy your opponent) and to enjoy all of the possibilities of your units. Hurl out a battle cry with your hero character and march across the battlefield, slicing every enemy unit you encounter...And that's what it's all about! Or not; maybe you prefer a more sophisticated approach, with employing methods like trading and diplomacy? By using diplomacy, you can reach a settlement with one realm and use their resources or units to defeat the other.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that there's a nice level editor that gives you the opportunity to create new missions and even new civilizations. Additionally, the multiplayer has one great option -- players can choose any nation from any period of human history, which means you can try out German plains from WW II and employ them against fierce Russian futuristic tanks (and throw in a couple of medieval British Knights - it will be a blast).

Truthfully, there are a lot of good things about Empire Earth that simply cannot be described, but that are really fun to experience. In the end, all I can say is that the variety of features, in terms of gameplay, have shown all the essentials of an excellent real-time strategy game. Of course, if it weren't for the awkward size of the models and the glitches that occur with pathfinding, the game might've been given a higher score.