GameplayĪll that said, Age of Empires III feels a lot like every other installation before it. Earning experience points so that I can change the color of my marketplace isn't much of a motivator. I also find the notion of "dressing up" my Home City with little improvements to be a waste of time. I like using the Home City to send goods, but it's really not doing anything to make the game feel like it's a cumulative effort. Thus, on the persistence tip, the game doesn't deliver. There's nothing like putting some TLC into a town and its defenses only to have that all wiped in the next battle. The two acts just didn't meld together at all, and it was a tad bit irritating. The problem is that I finished the previous act with an army of 40 units and I beat the attacking forces like a red-haired step-child. The next act assumes that you barely held out, that your town was ravaged, and that you're down to just a few soldiers. You have to survive 15 minutes before a backup army comes, but here's the problem. For example, in one episode you have to fend off Indians who are attacking your colony. While cards I collect may persist, in the game itself it misses the mark in a big way. In fact, here's what I think about AoE III's attempt to make the experience feel more "cumulative": they fail. Also, when your cards persist between home city changes (e.g., cards chosen when Malta is your home city stay with you a generation later when Boston is your home city), it doesn't make a lot of sense. I feel like the home city was an excuse to make eye candy that could then be used to distribute really astonishing screenshots. There's more strategy as a result ("do I use this now, or later?"), but you don't necessarily need a home city to implement this. I'll admit, it's nice to be able to send 600 coins to my colony when I'm short on cash, or some extra musketeers when the going gets rough, but I don't think it adds much persistence to the game. The cards that you chose when you have enough experience to get them stay with you through the whole act. AoE III embraces that idea further, giving you more cards, the ability to get more cards with increased experience, and requiring that you use your home city to cash in on your bonuses during gameplay. Those of you who have played Rise of Nations know about "cards"little bonuses that you can use in a game to gain an advantage in, for instance, resource collection or extra military units. I think this latter concept of "persistence" is supposed to be the Big Kahuna. Perhaps the biggest introduction to the AoE experience is the "Home City" concept, which serves two purposes: your home city can send you shipments during a game (big plus), and your experience as you play allows your home city to "persist" with certain improvements throughout the course of the game.
AGE OF EMPIRES 3 RATING PRO
That said, if you don't have a meaty video card (6800 Ultra here, and can run high anti-aliasing at 1280x1024, but not higher), you may miss out on much of this, although a colleague with a Radeon 9700 Pro says that he has been able to tweak with good results (on a Pentium 4 2.8GHz box, mind you). The physics, tied in with the vastly improved graphics, makes this the most visually appealing real-time strategy title out there right now, I think (Civ IV isn't released yet, and the style of play is bit different). Cannons fire with authority, and naval battles are quite visually appealing. Instead of just superimposing some fire on top of a town center as it gets damaged, big pieces of the building fly off, and things crash in a more dynamic manner. Cannonballs will now bounce across battlefields, crushing enemies and damaging buildings as they go.
The physics in this game really make it fun to play. In what follows, I'm going to talk about the single player campaign.
Hit up the official site of AoE III if you know nothing about the game, or want pretty screenshots. I've had a chance to play through into Act III of the game (2/3 done), and these are my comments so far.
AGE OF EMPIRES 3 RATING FULL
We may or may not have time to bring you a full review of Age of Empires III, but with some doctors' orders to relax a bit more, I decided to pick up the Collectors Edition when it was released earlier this past week.