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Empire Earth III

User Rating:

ESRB: Blood and Gore,Language - Mild,Suggestive Themes,Violence
Publisher: Sierra
Genre(s): Strategy
Home Page: http://www.empireearth.com/

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By: Aaron Barnes Nov 27, 2007

Earplugs Required

Warranting special mention is the terrible audio. In-game music is atrocious, and sound effects are completely generic. On both Windows XP and Windows Vista, sounds pops in and out randomly on a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi card, but you may not notice, as ambient noises are so sparse to begin with. Bringing the audio down from merely terrible to utterly unbearable is the completely unnecessary voice acting. A futile attempt was made to give the game a light-hearted tone with units' scripted quips, but the dialog is so unfunny and out-of-place that I turned the speakers off in disgust - it's that bad. Why this dialog was ever included in the first place is beyond rational reasoning.

Take It Out To Pasture: The Empire Earth Series Is Done

Pack it up and move on out - Empire Earth 3 is ready for the trash heap.

The first sign of trouble for Empire Earth 3 was the version 1.1 release-day patch. Fixing a one-off, last-minute bug with a release-day patch is understandable; attempting to finish the game with such a patch is not. The Empire Earth 3 1.1 patch addresses such fundamental issues as making units "... more responsive to move and attack orders during combat" and "Multiple fixes to tutorial to avoid non-progression issues". Either the game was pushed out the door for a holiday release, or someone at Sierra recognized that the game had gone too far off course to be salvaged. The released product is as pared-down as an RTS game can get; there's little emphasis on strategy and few potential variations in gameplay.

What remains is plagued by bugs and a lack of continuity that can only be attributed to an unfinished product. A post-mortem for the game would read like a case study of what happens when everything goes wrong in developing a video game. Ultimately, Empire Earth 3 is a contender for one of the worst games of the year, and easily earns the dubious recognition as a series-killer.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	1.7 GHz Intel Pentium 4, AMD Athlon XP processor or equivalent	3.2GHz Intel Pentium 4, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or faster processor (dual core processor recommended)
Memory	512 MB	1 GB or more
Graphics Card	DirectX 9.0c-compliant 128MB 3D video card supporting hardware T&L and Shader Model 2.0 or higher	DirectX 9.0c-compliant 256MB video card supporting hardware T&L and Shader Model 3.0 or higher (512MB SLI compatible 3D video cards recommended)
Graphics Card Example	NVIDIA GeForce 6000 series graphics card or equivalent	NVIDIA GeForce 7000 series graphics card or equivalent
Free Disk Space	6.5 GB	6.5 GB
Net Link	Broadband/LAN, DSL or faster Internet Connection for online play	Broadband/LAN, DSL or faster Internet Connection for online play

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 3500+ / Intel Pentium 4 540	AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ / Intel Core 2 Duo E6450
Memory	1 GB	2 GB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon X1650 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 7600 256MB	ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 512MB / NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
Free Disk Space	6.5 GB	6.5 GB
Net Link	Broadband	Broadband

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	50	Not unplayable, but hardly enjoyable. Starcraft-era RTS conventions abound, and core gameplay is simplified to the point of banality. Unsurprisingly, the multiplayer experience isn't worthwhile either.
Graphics	55	Below what's expected of a contemporary PC RTS. Models and textures are passable, but there's nothing exceptional or noteworthy. Effects, such as explosions and fire, are bland, and there's nothing special about the shaders or dynamic lighting.
Audio	49	One word: unbearable. If the chintzy sound effects and canned music have you reaching for the volume knob, then the tacky and out-of-place voice acting will have you looking for earplugs. Without question, the most inappropriate and out-of-place scripted banter ever in an RTS.
Technology	53	Performs poorly on even high-end systems, and even with a release-day patch, a memory leak and random crashes plague the game. Support for multi-core CPUs would have bumped up performance, but everything about the game points to a rushed release.

OVERALL

In a year of excellent RTS titles, Empire Earth 3 has nothing to offer. In an effort to garner mass appeal, the game has been dumbed down to the point of irrelevancy. Series fans have no reason to return, and newcomers have no reason to show up in the first place. Empire Earth 3 is the epitome of a video game series' death knell.

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2nd Opinion

When I first tested the game, I hadn't realised there was a "release day" patch and was astounded by the horrendous performance and crashes on a top-end machine. The update improved things somewhat but in some ways, it just makes the game even worse. Why? Well, pre-patch, one could endure about 10 minutes of gameplay before the code would bail out, crying Goodbyeeee, but with the "fixes," the torture continues for even longer. The main campaign is just an absolute grind - you spend ages gaining a couple of new territories, only for them to be invaded by enemy clans or random tribes, forcing you to go through the whole process again. Even if you somehow manage to endure the agony long enough to move into a new epoch, and accordingly gain better weapons and so forth, most of the time one's opponents have reached the same stage too, leaving neither side with any advantage.

In fact, there is virtually no way of gaining any kind of advantage over the enemies, apart from frantic resource collecting. Some regions have clearly marked "bottlenecks" which can be easily defended (by just filling the area with countless troopers or long range cannons) but that's it for tactics - it's the Field-Marshal Douglas Haig of RTS games: pile 'em up, send 'em and wander off for some tea and tiffin. Sounds fun? A little bit... for 10 minutes but the pleasure rapidly evaporates when it becomes painfully clear that the entire game is this sequence repeated ad infinitum.

Still, at least Sierra have the mighty World in Conflict...

Nick Evanson