The real-time strategy genre is extremely competitive, and it's probably the most active genre in PC gaming. New RTS games are released at an amazing pace, a dozen or so new ones almost every year. Through it all, a handful of franchises stand head and shoulders above the rest. Ensemble Studios' Age of Empires series is one of those stalwart giants. Age of Empires III approaches its release date and an eerie calm settles over the battlefield, the kind of moment that gets everyone's rapt attention. Someone's bringing out the big guns and the tide of war is about to turn.
Age of Empires III picks up where Age of Empires II: Age of Kings left off and takes place in The New World (that's the Americas for those of you who slept through history class). As with all of the Age of Empires games, you can choose from several civilizations as the basis for your empire and each civilization has different bonuses. In Age of Empires III, you can now also ally with Native American tribes, adding their strength to your own for some new strategic possibilities.
The game brings forth some major new features that look like they might turn the RTS genre on its ear. The biggest of these innovations is the concept of the Home City. Traditionally, in RTS games, once a game is over, it's over. If you start a new game you start again from scratch. Ensemble Studios saw room for improvement here and their solution dovetails neatly with the game's setting. Civilization was already thriving on the other side of the ocean as the New World was being explored. Expeditions were funded and backed by great European cities who sought to reap the benefits of the untamed, uncharted continent. Age of Empires III lets you benefit from that relationship. Throughout the game, you'll get shipments of resources, reinforcements or technologies from abroad and your actions in The New World will benefit your Home City in return as new technology and experience is transferred back across the sea.
The Home City persists from one multiplayer or skirmish game to the next. It works like a card game. After each skirmish or multiplayer game ends, the experience earned for your Home City can be used to purchase 'cards'. A 'card' is a set of resources, special units or technological innovation that can be shipped from your Home City in future games. These cards can be arranged into 'decks' and upon requesting your first shipment from your Home City in a skirmish or multiplayer game, you can choose from which 'deck' all of your shipments will come for that game.
This is an extremely cool idea. This unique feature lets you build packages that enhance your personal playing style. You'll even be able to keep several of these packages and choose which one is most desirable and appropriate for the particular map you're playing. You wouldn't need a deck of ship bonuses if there's no water around after all.
The other major feature that really sets Age of Empires III apart, not only from its predecessors but also from its competitors, is the game's graphics and physics engine. Yes, that's right. This real-time strategy game is equipped with a very robust, very detailed physics engine. If you bombard a building with cannons, the building is literally blown apart bit by bit. If you see a piece of roof go flying, it's because a piece is now missing from the roof. This incredible level of destructive detail is, as far as I know, a first for the genre. In playing some of the single-player campaigns, I kept destroying enemy buildings long after the objective was complete just to watch them splinter and shatter and collapse into rubble. The graphics in general are detailed and beautiful, and combined with the fully destructible buildings, they provide for an impressive level of realism. If your base survives a mortar attack, it will look exactly like it's just survived a mortar attack.
That's all for now. We'll have a full review of the game after it's released in a few months, but in the meantime you can grab a preview demo over at the game's official website: http://www.ageofempires3.com It's well worth a look for just about anyone who loves real-time strategy games.
I'm a thirty-something computer programmer. I live in Delaware, but I grew up in Arkansas in a tiny town of 2500. We didn't have video arcades. Heck, it was nearly an hour's drive to anything as sophisticated as a Wal*Mart. Needless to say, my exposure to video games as a child was somewhat limited.
In the mid 80's, I cut my teeth on a used Atari 2600 bought at a flea market and a handful of games like Space Invaders and Pac Man. I was hooked in a blink. In the decades since, I've become a big fan of many genres of games. From first-person shooters to role-playing to strategy and everything in between. The only games that categorically don't interest me are sports games.
The easiest way for a game to win me over is to have a gripping story. I'll forgive a lot in a game that grabs me and keeps me interested. The inverse is true, too. If a game does not have a killer story, its gameplay had better be pretty darn compelling to make up for it. That doesn't happen very often
