The other aspects of gameplay will be familiar to those who played the Age of
Empires games before. Your bases are centered on the Town Center which produces
the peasants that perform construction and resource gathering duties for you.
Around your Town Center you can build various production and resource buildings
which you use to build and upgrade your army. It’s all similar enough that you
Age of Empires veterans can pretty easily jump right in, begin playing, and be
pretty successful at it. Sure there are various tweaks to the gameplay here and
there such as farms that do not have to be continually replanted and the
elimination of the need for resource drop points, but there aren’t any
significant departures from the Age of Empires model here. Not that this is
necessarily a bad thing as Age of Empires III is every bit as much fun to play
as its predecessors.
 |
| Life back at the Home City. |
While the gameplay has not gone through a major overhaul, the graphics
certainly have. Age of Empires III is a 3D game and it takes full advantage of
its new graphics engine. The game is gorgeous and packed with details such as
waves that realistically roll across the water while buoying ships up and down.
The battle effects include pieces of roof and masonry falling from buildings
under fire and units sent flying from the impact of a cannon shell. You can also
now zoom the camera in and out, although you’ll probably just leave the camera
pulled back as far as possible most of the time as zooming in any closer than
that makes it difficult to manage your forces.
The game comes with a three part campaign that follows three generations of a
family and their adventures in the New World. The first act follows the
adventures of a knight leading an expedition to the New World, the second takes
place on the frontiers of a young America, and the last takes place in the
American West with some jungle adventure in the Amazon thrown in for good
measure. In a welcome touch your main characters can be temporarily put out of
commission but they will never die during a mission. You won’t be faced with the
need to replay a long mission that you were on the verge of winning simply
because you goofed and offed your main character as is the case in many RTS
games. Overall the campaign is pretty enjoyable and provides missions with a
variety of objectives and gameplay. It is also lengthier than most campaigns
that ship with RTS games and will keep you happily occupied for a good deal of
time. All of the cutscenes are rendered in-engine and show off the power of the
game’s new 3D model.
Of course you can always play the game in skirmish mode, setting game
parameters and the number of computer opponents you’ll face. One point of
interest is that the multiple victory conditions of the prior Age of Empires
games are gone. There is only one way to win games in Age of Empires III and
that’s through conquest – my apologies to you wonder builders out there. The
maps provide a good variety of terrain, from the frozen tundra of the Yukon to
the jungles of the Amazon, and from the islands of the Caribbean to the
grasslands of the Great Plains, and they are randomized for each game. You can
select the level of the AI of your computer opponents to one of five levels; the
lowest making the computer a pushover and the highest providing a serious
challenge to the best strategy gamers.
« Page 1 of 3 · Page 2 of 3 »
