Customer Reviews

Empire Earth 3

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I loved the gaming experience of the open skirmishes of EEII Exp. and the graphic quality was good. These guys at MadDoc completely ruined this game. The graphics are poor at best even at the more extreme settings. Performance is atrocious. The user interface has changed for the worse. Game play suffers greatly compared to EEII. Apparently they were not able to use the original game engine and it certainly shows. I completely wasted $50 on this worthless gaming experience. I've been playing strategy games since the original Command and Conquer and beleive me you WILL be dissappointed if you buy this mess. Since we can't return opened games, please show these misrepresenting jerks by not purchasing this rip-off.

This is the worst game I have ever owned. It seems like a cross of the video play of Zeus or Poseiden and Rise of Nations. Please save your money and spend it on a good game like pong.

The EMPIRE EARTH series have always been trying to occupy the ground between the CIVILIZATION and the AGE OF EMPIRES franchises. Their downfall was mostly their over-complication - in this way, limiting their audience. So EE2 (although a great game!) came and went mostly unnoticed; this was the release that should have been the comeback. Well, it managed to come back as AGE OF EMPIRES 2½ - at the most...

There are a number of "innovations" in this third installment. One of the first thing you may notice is the global perspective. In a (real or randomly created) planet earth map (similar to the one in RISK III, although more detailed and interactive) strategic movements and provincial decisions are made. Improvements are built and battles are fought in the provinces level, in maps both detailed and beautifully rendered.

The graphics you will either love or hate! Whereas AGE OF EMPIRES III went the way of unit realism, EMPIRE EARTH III features clear "cartoonish" units (similar to those of WARCRAFT III) with detailed natural movements. Buildings, aided by their size, are much more realistically designed and...destroyed.
Weather effects are a nice touch. The first time it snows and everything turns white you may find it amusing. Then you will realize that it actually makes it harder to discern both units and the outline of your own camp!
Zooming is possible, yet it too manages to feel uncomfortable as the camera movement follows a parabolic (not a straight) trajectory.

There are three cultural spheres of influence (Western, Middle-Eastern & Eastern) within which you can either choose or customize the civilization you will control. Each civilization group features its own tech tree and the gameplay is pretty much balanced. You do have to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of each to be victorious.
The controls are well designed and intuitive, do not clutter up the screen, and the building menus are at easy reach.

What is inescapable to notice is that EE3 is a much LESS complicated game: whereas EE2 featured 14 distinct civilizations spanning 15 epochs and in search of 4 resources, EE3 features only 3 distinct civilizations (with their respective tech-trees), spanning only 5 epochs (Ancient, Medieval, Colonial, Modern & Future) and collecting only 2 resources (raw materials & wealth). The number of units (and their possible upgrades) also got reduced.

So is this EMPIRE EARTH - FOR DUMMIES?
I guess experienced TBS/RTS gamers will be somewhat disappointed: not only is the level of complexity reduced, the game feels more like an action RTS than ever. More casual gamers, though, will enjoy it more - and I guess it is those later gamers that have been targeted by VIVENDI UNIVERSAL this time. Take your pick based on your experience.

I probably should had awarded it no more than 3 stars, but here is hoping they decide to clean up their act on the next installment.

This was once an innovative series. It did not deserve this...

I am extremely disappointed with Empire Earth 3.
Having played both EE 1 and 2, I had high expectations for EE3, especially considering how vastly better EE2 was than EE1. However, I have been let down for these two main reasons:
1. EE is now too simple. EE1 and EE2 had such complexity and depth of strategy and customization; the developers didn't treat the gamers as idiots. You had to actually think to play the game. Now, the techs are reduced, the epochs are not only short in advancing from one to another, but lack complexity in each epoch to make someone want to stay in a particular epoch for too long.
2. EE3 has performance issues. Granted, my computer isn't a dedicated gaming rig, but with a 8800GT 512mb video card, a Q6600 quad core and 3 gigs of ram, one would expect the graphics to run at least somewhat smoothly. However, at the lowest graphical settings and with nothing else running in the background, EE3 still manages to run slow during skirmishes, and unplayable in Earth-view during the world domination game. This is with the 1.1 patch.

On the upside, some of the graphics are admittedly nicely done, and overall the game is still playable for short periods of time, if you ignore the performance issues. This is definitely a game you'd want to borrow from a friend to try first before buying, EVEN if you've played the first 2.

Those of you that still remember the first Empire Earth, will know that if you set-up the game for 2 players, the difficulty to the default setting and hit the start button... you'll be sit on that chair for 2hours++ just to get through the stone age.
I could still remember that I use to play one battle for more than 2 days.

For me the only really weak point of Empire Earh III is the game play duration. If you start a Skirmish battle with the same setting as meantioned above you'll probably finish the game within 2 hours. (So much for RTS). The rest of the improvements are quite nice, they have added "World Domination" mode (almost like the board game: Risk). Improvements are made on the character/object modeling an the enviroment.

For those of you that like the long game play... stick to Empire Earth I. Other than that, the overall game experience is really nice.

If only someone else owned and published this title so perhaps the occasional crashes were distant memories along with Sierra Games 286 programs of long ago.

If only when selecting an item, the game would not pop me to the non interactive edge of the map.

If only the AI would not cheat and spawn fresh enemies from off the map.

If only automatic militia building placement had a tad forethought.

If only there was a minute of grace period at the start of a provincial war. Spawning in the middle of overwhelming numbers is quite rude.

If only the AI would not permit your units from blocking one another during moves.

If only troops could not fall off bridges and get stuck.

If only the game was not so addicting, I could have gotten the garden in on time.

Empire Earth III is still a fun must have for the serious collector and gamer of the series. Even when popping out to Desk Top often, game crashes and lockups are far less frequent than my other Sierra titles.

The character audio scripts are cute. When they begin to annoy, an option permits them to be turned off.

I retired from designing/publishing business software and the grandkids expressed an interest in Empire Earth III since last year I had given them each Empire Earth II. One is starting college this coming semester and an avid gamer. A great joy of his was to advance a scenario into a great pickle and leave it to grandpa to figure how to survive it.

Empire Earth III is fun, passes the hours and another enticement for the grandkids to visit their grandpa's farm. Gaming doesn't get better than playing with friends and family.

In spite of the "If only" roster, I recommend this game.

This game is almost exactly similar to Rise of Nations (perhaps even based off the same engine), except you'll notice the following differences:

-The game engine is designed for a system that does not yet exist. I ran this game on my HPE-257c with an Intel Core i7 Processor i7-930 2.80GHz 8 MB LGA1366 CPU, Retail BX80601930, 8gb of RAM, and an Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 - 1 GB DDR3 DP/DVI-I/VGA PCI-Express Graphics Card 100293DP and even on minimum settings with all the special options off, the game still skips and lags. Higher settings will skip more, and still look horrible. I can run Modern Games like Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty on Medium-High settings at 60 FPS (V-sync enabled). It might be trying to do physics processing or something (I do not have a physics card), but it doesn't mention that on the box or the game settings or the game installer that you need a physics processing unit. I have yet to even SEE a game REQUIRING AGEIA PhysX or Havok FX, or other physics engine that requires a Physics processing unit.
-Voice overs are silly and nonsensical and take away from the game
-The West is probably over-powered with any higher-than-normal map resource settings since the population limit is the same for all three factions.
-There is no age specific to 1950s - The modern era is confused with the entire 20th century, so it seems.
-The East's units were pulled out of their ass.
-Resource system oversimplified.
-Overall not fun to play.

I bought this game quite some time ago, and now that I see I've seen it again, I had to drop by and say just how terrible this game is. This game, is an ABOMINATION. Period. If you liked EE2, keep it at that. In this piece of crap, you can't produce anywhere near the number of you units you can produce in EE2, there are only 3, THREE, races to choose from, the game is full of bugs (you'll be lucky if you can play an hour straight), and the gameplay just outright sucks. Thanks Sierra, you've let us down, again.

Let me just preface by saying I owned both EEI and II and enjoyed them very much. I thought EEIII was going to be great, but it doesn't meet my expectations and it disappoints me. The game is a good one, it just is quite a deviation from EE I and II and I'm not sure it's worth $50.

There are only 5 epochs with an incredibly simplified tech tree/unit upgrade system. The world domination mode is neat and can give replayability, but single battle mode has predetermined maps to work from so that can be a hassle if you don't want to go through the time-consuming world domination mode. The resources are also much simplified(knowledge, raw materials, and wealth) which I feel tends to drop the skill needed for good gameplay. There are also much fewer units available to build. Coupled with the fact there are only 5 epochs, you could probably say there are fewer than 75 total units you can build(even with the fact that each of the three factions have entirely different available units).

I personally don't care about how pretty a game looks; if it's good, I'll play it no matter what. The graphics are pretty sharp and destruction of buildings is neat, however, I will say that EE III has a more cartoonish version of units and requires enormous computing/graphics power to run well. I've got a 3.6 GHz P4 processor with a Radeon X1850XT(512MB/256bit) graphics card and it just does the job on the lowest video settings possible.

Take home message: If you're a hardcore fan of the EE series, this game probably isn't what you had in mind so beware. If you're more of a casual gamer, then this is probably a really good fit for you. In the end, no matter who you are, I still wouldn't recommend paying $50 for this game. $30 would be much more economical.

-The most disappointing for this empire earth series it's that it doesn't have any story-lines for the three factions.
-If you like Warcraft III, you're probably like the graphic in this game.
-The gameplay for single player campaign is more like Medieval Total War II with RTS features (like gathering resources and building units).
-Be aware of the system requirement, even with my thin gaming laptop, i couldn't play the game smoothly and had to turn all features to the lowest. below is my system:
2.0Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB of Memory RAM
ATI x1400 of 256MB