Review : Age of Empires III

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Daedalus
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Review : Age of Empires III

Post by Daedalus »

I take this review directly from the PostMortem :

I suppose strategies could use some love here, so I've been playing Age of Empires 3 lately! Here's a review! (Minor spoiler alert.)


It seems that the Age of Empires series is moving along the timeline and has now become colonial and centered around the development of the Americas! That's right, you'll get muskets, cannons, dragoons and many more!

Firstly I shall get the graphics out of the way. The graphics are excellent - nothing that'll take away your breath, but they'll definitely provide some visual satisfaction. What makes the graphics excel, however is the fact that this is the first strategy game, in my experience, that has 'true' psychics; soldiers hit by cannon balls will go flying across the terrain, possibly hitting rocks and cliffs! Soldiers can be blown off cliffs into water! Most impressive of all, probably, is the fact that pieces of buildings will actually blow off! No more cute little fires and buildings disappearing, oh no, these buildings really blow up! The naval battles are great, as the ships will rock from side to side as they fire and it's fun to see their wood splinter and masts break as they take damage!

Another factor that's really attractive is the sound. It's not brilliant, but cannon balls will roar through the sky, which sounds great. Artillery firing off the screen sound like distant thunder, which is really cool. Soldiers will scream as gunfire blows your ears away!

But graphics and sound do not a game maketh, so let's discuss some gameplay features.

First of all, resource management has been dumbed down. Whether this is good or bad is up to you. There are now three resources; gold, food and wood. Stone (from the previous AoE games) has been done away with. There is, however, a new 'resource' called Experience. Before the term scares you, however, let's just say that all that experience does is that if you collect enough of it you can get a shipment from your home city. Shipments can be anything from a small collection of troops, to upgrades or even crates of resources, so Experience is quite an incentive to go out there and kill!

As far as strategy goes, Age of Empires has stuck to its old formula (which works), so it has remained true to the series, which is a good move and is probably why it's reached a trilogy. The strategy is the usual 'unit X' counters 'unit Y' while 'unit Y' counters 'unit Z'.

Short build times mean that the action is fast and brutal.

Probably the most impressive feature of all, however, is that the different teams you can play in this game feature different infantry, as well as building appearances and, of course, the teams have small bonuses and strengths.

So, what's bad?

With the emphasis taken off of resource management, there isn't a whole lot of pressure to control specific points on the map. This takes out some of the fun.

I only checked Skirmish, not multiplayer and there were only two game types, so this has been severely reduced.

Conclusion : It won't shake the foundations of strategy gaming by any means, but it will make for some good fun. It's a must-have for the strategy game freak, but the normal guys, without multiplayer will have fun for a week, tops. Personally I think it lacks the charm of AoE 2.

Epic? No way, but it'll definitely give you a thrill or two.
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