Amazon.co.uk Review
Taking Real Time Strategy games to the limits,
Empire Earth hopes to tackle the mantle of the
Age of Empires series, the
Master of Olympus games and
Cossacks all in one foul swoop.
Based on a similar design as many empire building RTS games, Empire Earth takes you from simply prehistoric man through the ages to the Nano age, via the Bronze age and the renaissance era.
Troops are controlled in the usual manner, and the game revolves around your management of your armed forces, be it air, ground or sea while at the same time making sure your citizens are harvesting enough minerals and food to keep the whole show on the road.
The truth be told, this is a re-make of all the popular RTS available on the market, offering campaigns, scenarios, multiplayer maps as well as random maps to get you straight into the action. The nice thing, however, is that you can take your tribe through the ages and watch the new technology as it is introduced and see how it fairs on the battlefield.
If you are a fan of the RTS genre then there are plenty of new gizmos and gadgets in this game to offer a new challenge--the Greeks have the help of the gods for example. If your new to the genre however, this offers as good a place to start as any and the training levels will be sure to get you into the action in no time. --Jason Denwood
Product Description
This real-time strategy epic by
Age of Empires creator Rick Goodman, lets you control the development of your chosen race from the Paleolithic era to the futuristic Nano Age of the 23rd century. You can choose from some of history's best known civilisations, such as the Greeks, or evolve your own as you play by choosing from well over 100 unique attributes.
You can train more than 200 types of combat units and take advantage of the military savvy of some of the humanity's most notorious leaders, from Charlemagne to Churchill. You can fight them on the beaches, you can sink their battleships, by engaging in naval battles with more than 40 different ships, from 16th-century ships-of-the-line to modern aircraft carriers, or you can reach for the skies, with over 30 types of aircraft, such as Sopwith Camels, Spitfires, F-15s, Apache Gunships and B-2 Bombers. In the future you can even train colossal and intelligent 'mechs to ward off the alien invasion.
The game also makes good use of atmospheric effects and terrain, allowing you to take advantage of the cover of night in a stealth mission, or gain the upper hand by taking the upper ground. But military might is not the only way to win the day. Religion is also a good way of conquering enemy forces and you can surreptitiously convert an enemy's citizens with furtive priests and if you are feeling particularly Old Testament, you can instruct a prophet to invoke devastating calamities such as volcanoes, earthquakes and plagues. Empire Earth gives you great freedom to rule exactly how you see fit.
