Age Of Empires 3 Review
To paraphrase The Who, meet the New World, same as the Old World.Of course, it doesn’t look the same. Three years on from the stunning Age of Mythology, Ensemble have once again raised the bar for strategy game visuals. Age of Empires III is beautiful to look at. Attractive in still screenshots, in motion it’s really something else. Just look at the gorgeous, shimmering water, the rugged contours of that unexplored landscape. Admire the detailed, brilliantly animated units, the settlers chopping trees, planting crops or hunting deer, the way that buildings splinter and shatter when they receive one cannon ball too many.
Zoom in and check out the detail – the jumping fish, the wildlife, the smoke, the vegetation. Watch ships gliding along a channel between two tropical islands. Few games, full stop, have looked this good.And on first impressions, the game underneath has undergone a transformation. It’s still an RTS, it’s still concerned with the old themes of base building, resource gathering and enemy crushing, but those themes have taken something of a twist. Firstly, like Age of Mythology, AoE III takes a story-based approach to the main single-player campaign.
Tracking a family saga across three acts, taking in different historical eras and running from Malta through the Caribbean before settling down in the Americas, it gives you more than just conquest for motivation, with characters, cut-scenes and some nifty spots of conspiracy and betrayal to get your teeth into. Secondly, the AoE III exploits its “European powers in the new world” theme by maintaining strong links between your colonizing forces and the homeland. In fact, the game’s biggest innovation is a new Home City screen, which will differ according to your chosen civilization: Spanish, British, French, Portuguese, Russian, Ottoman, German or Dutch. During campaign missions, single player skirmishes or even multi-player games, players can request shipments from their home cities, containing resources, troops, bonus abilities, and that general sort of thing.
Age Of Empires 3 Mac Review
This is of enormous assistance, particularly when you need some help to shore up your defences in a hurry, or turn the tide of battle in your favour.In return, victories won in the new world mean upgrades for the Home City, adding new shipping options to your selection. If you fancy, you can even make cosmetic changes to your city, transforming the look of buildings or choosing characters to bustle around in the background. Now, the Home City isn’t quite the killer feature Ensemble seem to think it is – it’s more a cool feature than a reason to keep playing – but it both ties the game together and gives you good reason to really get to grips with your choice of civilization. Naturally, this in itself has a downside: it practically discourages you from taking other civilizations for a spin, which when each has a slightly different flavour and different units and capabilities to enjoy, would be a shame.
The original Age of Empires sold a gazillion copies by ushering in the idea of epochs in real-time strategy games (where you slowly move your civilization through a series of technological ages). Since then, Age of Mythology and Age of Empires II each offered incremental changes, and Age of Empires III keeps the streak alive. That's both good and bad: the gameplay is accessible, easy to learn and very polished, but too often Age III has a 'been there, done that' feeling.The single-player campaign, which spans 24 scenarios and three acts, tells an uninspired story of New World conquest as various European factions slug it out for supremacy. The dialogue serves no other purpose than to tell you what to do, and the cut-scenes prove fairly pointless.So what's truly new? An entirely new 3D engine makes Age III look better than most strategy games - lush and vibrant environments populated with well-animated soldiers spruce up the uninspired gameplay. Better still, the new physics engine can throw enemy soldiers into the air with a well-placed cannot shot.
Cruel and awesome.As you explore and conquer the world, you can request supplies, units and other bonuses from your Home City, your European headquarters. It's a nice a feature, but hardly the revolution that it was supposed to be. The only other major gameplay innovation lets you ally with Native Americans and recruit from their ranks. Unfortunately, the scenarios far too often follow the 'build base, attack enemy' dynamic that has plagued the earlier Age games. Poor AI and pathfinding still remain, too. More Info GenreStrategyDescriptionGameplay is accessible, easy to learn and very polished, but too often Age of Empires III has a 'been there, done that' feeling.PlatformPCUS censor ratingTeenAlternative namesAoERelease date18 October 2005 (US), 4 November 2005 (UK).