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AOE III is the third installment in the famed Age of Empires historical RTS series dating back to 1997 and, amazing in this age of studio collapse and mergers, still developed by Ensemble Studios. The game takes place over the time of discovery in the Americas during three separate time periods: 17th Century Spanish Expansion, the French and Indian War, and then the age of westward expansion and Simon Bolivar's freeing of Venezuela. Fighting with sword, horse, canon and musket, the player works their way through a 24 mission typical real time strategy campaign mode, or plays online in multiplayer skirmishes and on ranked ladders.

The single player campaign takes the player through the three time periods and generations of the Black family. Morgan Black comes to the New World while following an Ottoman who belongs to the Circle of Ossus, a secret evil organization that is searching for the famed Fountain of Youth. The player goes through the first age helping the Aztecs and fighting the Spanish while tracking down The Circle. The second age deals with Morgan's grandson John Black as he continues the fight during the French and Indian War. Working with the Iroquois and Cherokee, John must help beat back the British while following a new generation of the Circle across the West. Finally, the third age deals with John's granddaughter Amelia who runs a railroading company and who also gets swept up in the Circle's never ending search for immortality.

AOE III's single player missions are, at best, tangentially historic. Instead of dealing with real historical battles or trying to be a simulator, the game uses history as just a backdrop. This is a shame in my view, as I was shocked to see them skip entirely over the Revolutionary war. That war was a battle and strategy rich time, a great story, and a great chance to teach people about that time period. I'm all for making history fun and turning a game into a learning tool without folks even realizing it. To top it off there are some obvious historical inaccuracies, such as the inclusion of big iron railroads far too early, which bug me a bit. So you have to understand that you are looking at a fantasy world based around a common theme, not something trying to be historically accurate.

The single player missions aren't very imaginative. Each mission follows the basic strategy that we've seen in RTS games since Command & Conquer. The missions vary between the normal "build and rush", "not enough resources" or the "move a small number of troops across the map." The first 12 missions are fairly easy, requiring very little strategy above "hunker down, build up, and rush". After the first half of the game though things get remarkably difficult, usually by limiting the number of resources or by making the PC side more powerful from the start. Still, each map has one or two strategic points that can be exploited and eventually you'll learn the best path through the map through perseverance. None of the missions really felt unfair, usually I'd just make bad decisions and have to restart until I found the right strategy.

The units aren't very interesting either, at least not after the first time you use them. There is no doubt the sheer power and awe of a dozen mortars hammering away at a walled fort, but otherwise you have fairly typical units: ranged fighters, hand to hand fighters, mounted fighters, and artillery pieces. There are special hero units who are characters within the narrative who cannot die and have one or two special abilities, such as a one shot kill or a long range attack. Once "killed" the units stay on the battlefield and groan until their health bar returns and you can get other units to the area to recover them. Other units may have a special attack or slight special ability, but nothing truly amazing.

Building and resource gathering are the same as you would find in any other RTS with one notable exception: villagers can gather resources without traveling back and forth to a central gathering point. Instead of having to run all of the lumber back to a mill to gather the resource, the villagers just clear-cut the trees where they stand saving precious time and management aggravation. Most resources also have a building that will generate them, for example in later stages you can build a plantation to generate coin to pay for improvements, farms to generate food and so on. As with the other AOE games, there is not a technology tree advances through a series of ages with each leap giving you new abilities, units and buildings. The buildings are all similar to every other RTS game with the typical infantry building, calvary building, artillery building, farms, houses, fixed gun outposts, and so on. Again, nothing new under the sun or truly unique here.

However, there IS one new feature awkwardly implemented in the single player game: the Home City screen. Because the game hinges around the idea of colonization and empire expansion, your character has a representative established city in Europe or, in later stages, the New World. These cities are used to send new units, extra resources and special abilities from overseas during your battles. As you fight, your Home City gains experience and levels like a role-playing game character might, and these open up new abilities through the use of "cards". Each card represents a once per battle or reusable resource that you can play during the game. More experience gives you more cards, so you can customize your Home City resources to your playing style.

In the single player game the Home City concept seems like more of an afterthought. Sometimes its helpful to get an edge up on your competition, but rarely does your Home City's abilities make or break a mission. After any length of time playing, you will build up enough experience to be able to attain every single card, nullifying any sort of strategy about how you build your city. On top of the cards, you can also customize some of the figures moving around your city and replace buildings to change the look. However, doing this has absolutely NO effect on the game play, which begs the question: why bother adding it?

Given the disappointment in the single player game, I was pleasantly surprised by the online multiplayer aspect and it made the Home City concept fall a little more into place. Multiplayer is built into AOE quite well, with a single main screen giving you access to everything from the game room browser, to built in ladders and chat rooms and even a clan interface. When you first start multiplayer you create Home Cities much like you would create a character in a MMOG. You select the country your Home City represents with each country having certain special abilities, you give your city a name and you name your hero explorer. Like the single player game, as you gain experience in multiplayer with your Home City it will gain levels and special abilities through the card system which makes more sense than how it is used in the single player. Once your city is created, you can quickly jump into a multiplayer game on the board and get to work and I happily report that I had no problem getting into the system or joining a game.

Unfortunately, the multiplayer games I played were EXTREMELY laggy. Things started off fine, with four of us playing as two teams on an island map. However, within the first half-hour, during a particularly intense naval battle the game slowed to a crawl. I could still move around and view my different units, but everything simply slowed down to a single digit frame rate. During this time, my teammate inexplicably disappeared, presumably giving up on the lag, though I didn't receive any notification of it. When things sped back up, I noticed about 15 minutes later that my teammate wasn't responding and that his city was in a complete standstill. This ended up losing the game for me as my flank was unprotected and I basically got rolled a little while later. I can only assume that this is due to the Internet connection and processing power of the hosting player and not a fault with the gaming service, but it was still a frustrating experience. Definitely read the recommended machine and connection specs before you decide to try to host an 8-way skirmish.

After playing multiplayer, it was pretty obvious that the designers really wanted to push this aspect of the game over the single player campaign. This is unfortunate, but understandable considering that there isn't much replay-ability in the single player campaign style, and not much challenge in the NPC skirmishes. At the time I was playing (about midnight eastern standard time) there were about 1300 players on the game server, which bodes well if the game continues to grow.

AOE III was billed as the "most beautiful" real-time strategy games of all time. I'll admit that it does live up to this boast, if of course you have the best in graphics and computer hardware to run it. There are just as many video options in this game as you would find in any first person shooter between reflection, shadows and anti-aliasing. The game also includes the Havok physics which does make the game marginally more interesting as each soldiers body falls a different way, trees topple over from canon fire, and buildings fall apart a different way every time. Of course after the first two missions you really stop paying attention to the advanced physics and real-time water reflections and worry about the game. I personally would rather game developers would work on new concepts for the genre than try to turn the genre into an arms race to the most polygons. A RTS game should NOT bring my 3.0Ghz P4 / Radeon Pro 9800 machine to a stuttering framerate. I expect that from Doom, but not a strategy game.

Even more frustrating is that this beautiful game with full 3D graphics has VERY basic camera controls. You have a very limited zoom, a fixed pan, and cannot rotate the view in any way. Maybe I'm spoiled, but if you are going to invest that much time and money in a beautiful 3D engine, then give the player the option of control to see things they way they want and let them play within that engine.

The one feature that I think SHOULD be trumpeted about this game is the use of sound. While not unique, the muskets and shouts of soldiers sound real and the boom of the artillery can be heard across the map, like amazing background thunder. When you are attacking the enemy Town Center, the music score swells into a climax theme lending great theater to the moment. These features are actually useful, as many times you need sound prompts to know you need to glance down at your game map and take action. Honestly, sound is a much more important part of the RTS game play than rag-doll physics any day, and I applaud the sound designers for AOE III for their great work.

Based on the very long lead up and hype of this game, I had much higher hopes. Great visuals make amazing screen-shots and help build up the hypemeter, but like most hype, it made me underwhelmed by the game. Everything to me felt like "more of the same" and, aside from the multiplayer options nothing really felt new. Unfortunately, this game might be a prime example of what some feel is the "stagnation" in the game industry, with companies sticking to "safe" titles and just churning out more of the same. I hope that the folks at Ensemble and Microsoft reuse the same game engine for AOE IV and spend their effort on really thinking through how to bust the RTS genre out of this slump and into new territory, lest it go the way of the point-and-click adventure.

My verdict is that if you are a huge AOE fan, and are ready for more of the same but expect to spend more time in multiplayer, get the game now. If you are an avid RTS fan, but not really looking to join multiplayer clans or ladders, you might want to wait until it at least it drops down a price point or so. If you are just a strategy buff, there are a lot of other titles around this season that might be better to look at first... you can come back to this game when its in the clearance bin.