oming into Age of Empires III, I had extremely high hopes and expectations. From the trailers and the screenshots, this game looked like everything I wanted out of real-time strategy. Unfortunately, it’s not. In a lot of ways, it’s more Age of Empires with some shiny new graphical tech for your viewing pleasure. And while that’s far from a bad thing, I frankly expected more out of the wonderfully-talented Ensemble Studios.
When this title does something well, it knocks it out of the park. Cannon fire booms with the kind of intensity Francis Scott Key wrote about. Buildings crumble and get pieces blown off in spectacular fashion. And the large-scale battles that inevitably take place in the later stages of the game are absolutely fantastic. Overall, the presentation is top-notch in just about every way it can be, and watching the destruction your magnificent armies can unleash is a blast. Bringing about these wonderful sequences, however, is another matter entirely.
I understand that the Age of Empires games have never really been about micro-managing your forces, but the failure of AoE III to meet a basic standard for control of your armies is inexcusable. There’s no way to get your troops to hold ground or patrol, and even basic attack-move orders are routinely botched by your minions. I could deal with the terrible unit AI if I had a decent way to control them directly, but the combination of these two irritations is too much. It’s like trying to play a guitar while wearing mittens.
The addition of the persistent Home City, one of the trumpeted features of AoE III, simply isn’t something I feel terribly strongly about. It’s cool to level it up and gain new things to send your colony, and I like the way you earn shipments by building, exploring, and fighting, but it’s just not a huge impact on the game one way or the other. Also, beyond the Home City, it feels like Age of Empires III has been simplified in a lot of ways from its predecessors. Economies are built on a much more bare-bones model (even so, I miss Empire Earth II’s economic tracking functions). Advancing through the Ages doesn’t feel as epic as it did in previous titles, either; promoting my Musketeers to veteran status hardly gives me that "Haha! The opposition will be crushed by my superior technology!" feeling.
Age of Empires III is a solid, fun game with a lot going for it. On many fronts, though, the series is treading water or even moving backwards with this installment. Dedicated players online will doubtless get a lot of mileage out of it, though, and the pleasantly lengthy single-player campaign ain’t half bad. Hopefully Ensemble will focus a little more on substance than style with its next game.