Empire Earth III (PC)

An RTS with feet of clay, as well as legs, a torso, arms, hands and a head of clay
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

When discussing Empire Earth III, there's no point pussyfooting around with the usual opening niceties: polite preliminaries about backstory, the previous games in the franchise, or the back-of-the-box incidentals of how it plays (Three factions! Five epochs! Over a hundred units!). Instead, let's just cut to the chase: Empire Earth III is absolutely wretched, with very nearly zero redeeming value. Barring some budgetware real-time strategy game of which no one has heard, this mess is an example of the genre at its absolute worst.

Although there are some solid ideas here, the execution undermines almost everything promising about Empire Earth III. For instance, the three factions are nicely differentiated, even if they don't have much personality beyond the truly god-awful puns units will make when you select them. Each faction is named after a broad region: West, East and Middle East. Or, in more specific terms, us, the Chinese and the Arabs. The Middle East is perhaps the liveliest for how it's a direct rip-off of Command & Conquer: Generals. The East gets points for getting weirder the further in time you go, until you're essentially playing the Zerg from StarCraft.

So far, so middling. But when it comes to actually playing the game, each side feels like a ramshackle assortment of special powers you'll probably never use. Many units, particularly in the later eras, have abilities that you have to manually activate. But units die so quickly, and the interface requires so much shuffling around and ungainly clicking, you'll rarely use a unit's ability. Instead, Empire Earth III seems to encourage you to simply build a bunch of stuff, throw it at a bunch of other stuff, and see who survives. Frag grenades, mustard gas, hero spells, EMP bursts and charging into combat for a damage bonus? They're all in there, but you'd never know it from the way a battle collapses in on itself as soon as it starts.

A lot of the blame rests with the terrible, terrible artificial intelligence (AI). Units seem to spend more time figuring out how to get around each other than fighting. Formations are brittle and scripted for certain numbers of units. This stresses the pathfinding to the breaking point, particularly in cramped areas (many of the maps consist of canyons and straits). The formation system falls apart if you're dealing with more than twenty units, so you're going to have to manually control different groups if you want to attempt anything resembling tactics. Normally, the interface should help you out here. No such luck. Empire Earth III simply swallows up all its units in a pit of drag selecting, minus about half of the hotkeys, visual cues and on-screen information it needs.

The economy is ill-suited to the pace and scale of the game. You age up by stocking city centers with scientists. You get more city centers by capturing poorly marked territories (the mini-map deserves its own paragraph of complaints). There are two types of resources: materials harvested from nodes (confusingly labeled as wood, stone or gold, but for no discernable reason) and wealth earned from trade routes between a territory's city center and its marketplace. Once you've taken control of a few territories, the whole thing becomes a sprawling mess. Tech upgrades for individual units and buildings are scattered throughout the game, and many of them are poorly explained. Think of whatever word is the opposite of elegant. That's Empire Earth III.