Empire Earth III Review

Mint Imperials

Empire Earth 3 is the recoil. The nerdy kid, filled with a newfound desperation to be popular, has just turned up at the gates of the school with a new haircut, outfit and attitude - but it looks like he's taken styling tips from MC Hammer and watched clips of Tobey Maguire's bizarre turn as "emo" Peter Parker in SpiderMan 3 as a behaviour guide. You take one look and know he's going to get beaten up. His lunch money is going to be public property for months to come. You feel bad, because he's trying so hard, but the law of the playground awards no free passes for effort.

Nor, we fear, does the law of the review. The third instalment in the franchise tries bloody hard to please, and in fact, it makes all the right noises at the outset. That can't, however, change the fact that the game ultimately finds itself tottering unsteadily along the dividing line between mediocrity and being genuinely awful.

Mad Doc's whole approach with Empire Earth 3 is all about two things; simplification, and diversification. So, the large number of different civilisations you could play as in the previous games have been chopped out, and replaced with three forces - the West, the Middle East and the East - which are more significantly different from one another than the old civilisations. The eras you progress through have also been chopped down, and there are now only five transitions between banging rocks together and marching giant death-robots across the scorched nuclear wastelands.

In theory, these are good ideas, and we were impressed by their potential when we previewed the game only a few weeks ago. In practise, however, they utterly fail to live up to their promise. This isn't a careful paring away of complexity to reveal the graceful, streamlined game experience at the heart - rather, it's a wholescale attack by a madman with a machete, hacking away vast chunks of the things which made Empire Earth good as well as the things which made it inaccessible.

The three forces follow a model not dissimilar to Starcraft in their technology trees, and in theory, each one should provide a different play experience. In practice, this doesn't really work. The Middle East stands out from the other two by having buildings which you can pack up and move, but other attempts to establish a unique play style for the races fall somewhat flat. You need to allow for blatant, incredibly obvious differences from the outset (building loads of cheap infantry as the East, say, or rapidly researching tech as the West), but differences to the tactical options in front of you only really emerge in the end-game, during the Future era, when each race gets high-end units with unique abilities.

The eras, too, are not structured in a way which compensates adequately for the over-simplification. It's simply too easy to blast straight through the research tree in a skirmish or multiplayer game, and each era transition is too powerful for its own good. The lovely balancing act at the heart of previous EE games - "shall I focus on research and risk having a small army, or build up my army and risk falling an era behind the enemy?" - is dead in the water as a result. The answer now is always to do more research, because the rewards for moving up an era are so incredibly over-powered, and the speed with which you can do so is so rapid.

Imperial Leather

On the ground, the tactical combat offered by Empire Earth 3 does little to compensate for its wider failings. Again, simplicity is a theme here. The game offers the rock - paper - scissors combat system which is the staple of RTS titles since the dawn of pointing and clicking, with so little enhancement that it can at best be described as shockingly generic.

Worse, though, is the one key way in which EE3's tactical combat does differentiate itself - namely the astonishing, mind-numbing stupidity of both your units, and the enemy AI. This is the lowest point in the game - so bad that it's actually laugh out loud funny at times. Armies regularly get stuck en route to their destinations because their pathfinding can't work out how to turn corners. Powerful melee units judder around looking lost and confused while light ranged units only a few yards away decimate them. Enemy forces never attack your base because they can't work out how to get to it - and on one memorable occasion, I'm pretty sure the enemy AI didn't actually even build any military units. The fact that problems as amateurish as this made it through QA is mind-boggling.

Even at that, we can't quite bring ourselves to give Empire Earth 3 the savaging which, on some levels, it richly deserves - simply because there are good ideas here, underlying the godawful mess. Take for example the turn-based World Domination mode, which presents you with a globe full of provinces for you to conquer, control, upgrade and so on. Yes, it's not a new idea - Rise of Nations does exactly the same thing - but it's still a good one, and some elements of Empire Earth's implementation of it are great.

We really like, for instance, the fact that you can upgrade provinces by building road networks through them, which speed up the movement of your armies. We like the fact that you can negotiate with and make peace with the native tribes in some areas, who will then fight on your behalf against your enemies. We like the fact that some (although not all) conflicts can be resolved automatically, without having to go and actually play the skirmish in RTS mode - although admittedly, if the RTS game was a bit better we probably wouldn't be so pushed on this function.

What we don't like is the fact that here, again, Empire Earth 3 is trying too hard to be populist - and throwing out all the stuff that made us fond of the earlier games. As you might have guessed from the removal of historical civilisations in favour of bland regional stereotypes, this isn't a game for history buffs any more. In fact, any trace of historical accuracy has gone out the window entirely. Each of the world regions you conquer is just a set of statistics, without even a nod to its real history, and the somewhat randomly generated nature of the game means that you'll find tribes from far-flung corners of the world located in completely the wrong areas.

The stupid reaches into other corners of the game, too. Particularly annoying are the unfunny, badly voice acted lines which your troops will come out with when you interact with them. They're not remotely amusing or well written, and just come across as another silly attempt to show that this is a game which is now all about fun and accessibility, rather than being concerned with history, strategy or, well, depth.

Moreover, the design mistakes which permeate the game are compounded by some really horrible technical mistakes. Being a PC game, we expect that patches will fix some flaws, but at launch this is a title with shocking framerates and odd crashes, multiplayer so badly bugged as to be largely unplayable, and the aforementioned terrible pathfinding and AI. It's the stinky, faecal icing on top of a deeply unappetising cake.