Age of Empires III (PC)

Graphically this game is beautiful and some of the effects are just wonderful. The weapons feel powerful and the ship -v- ship battles are just stunning. My graphics card is a 256 MB Radeon X600 and on any setting this game works well.

Playing the game is very interesting. There are now limits on the number of some things you can build - such as ships. The villages are now much better, and they do a lot with out being told. if they are idle and there is something obvious to do nearby - they will do it.

Home cities are a wonderful advancement in the game giving it a much more satisfying feel. The more you play the game the better the things you can have sent to you after every few minutes in the game. You gain experience for gathering resources etc., and then this allows you to ship in some extra coin, or eventually a mini army!!!

The campaigns are easy to get into and follow a nice family tale where you can somewhat empathise with the leaders you control. The objectives for the missions are no longer - kill everyone - but there are more specific objectives - one mission is simply to gain experience!

Though most of this game is strong, the one futile thing is treasures. Dotted around the map there are small treaures guarded by, say, a pack of wild bears. After using your explorer to kill the guardian, you can take the bounty - this is often a very small amount of coin etc. However, sometimes you get rewarded with a special warrior or some settlers, so its not all bad!

Overall a very good game, bound to provide hours of fun. The effects when blowing stuff up are very satisfying, and the overall style of the game is extremely finished - a wonderful improvement on a wonderful series of games. I thoroughly recommend you purchase this game.

The game. *What* a game!

Great gameplay. Great graphics (especially compared to AoE 1&2).

Items can be placed on the map in a much more freeform manner - there's no grid contraining you to a boring layout. This really makes a difference!

You now get a feeling of advancement between missions (even on skirmish mode) because you now get experience points which increase the level of your home city; the higher the level, the better "shipments" (supplies, tech advancements, troops) it can send you. You can even customise the shipments it can give you as it increases.

There's a variation on "crates" of suprise goodies sprinkled round the map; you have to kill the guardian (outlaws, bears, wolves) to uncover the trasure (worth food/gold/wood/experience or a settler, native medicine man, scout...)

You can ally with natives (i.e. American Indians) and gain tech advances and troops from them.

Oh, the list goes on.

Get the demo if you can - it's a hefty 375MB download, but I'm sure it'll be on a cover disk at some point. My only caveat is that my partition system didn't agree with the setup program (my C:\ drive is small, and this seemed to want 900MB there!).