Empire Earth II is one of those sequels with very little to prove. This is almost always a good thing. When a sequel has to completely reinvent the original game, you've got to wonder whether the original concept was ever really worth the effort. When a sequel has the guts to just update the art, streamline the gameplay, and pretty much leave everything that made the original game fun unmolested, well, that doesn't guarantee a classic, but it's a pretty good tip-off. In short, if you liked the original Empire Earth, you'll find the sequel quite familiar, but in a very satisfying way.
If you've never tried Empire Earth before, the game allows you to build cities and gather resources, which then allows you to build up an army (infantry, cavalry and artillery, plus naval units and eventually air support) that you can use to conquer your neighbors, virtual or multi-player. The game also takes in diplomacy, espionage and sabotage. A major part of the game is technical advancement - you can literally take a city from Neolithic times to the age of nano-tech (at the highest tech levels, you get fighting mecha to play with).
Everything is based on real-world history. You can choose from four culture types (Western, Middle-Eastern, Far-Eastern or - a nifty touch - Meso-American. Space age Aztecs make for some very cool gaming), each with at least three (five, in the case of the Western cultures) specific nationalities. You cultural choice determine the art set used to represent your milieu, but they also offer real tactical choices, positive and negative.
Of course, there are a lot of tactical formations and movement options to choose from. To tell you the truth, The Game Duffer didn't use these much. I prefer world-building to combat anyway - as a general rule - and mostly my tactics were to build up the biggest force as I could, as quickly as I could and throw it at the enemy. That this usually actually worked is probably a function of the very low difficulty level I was playing - I really wanted to get all the way through the game's three campaigns before writing the review, so I kept things easy to keep them moving. When The Game Duffer plays through Empire Earth II again, even he will up the difficulty a notch or two, where he'll probably have to learn how to use more of those nifty obscure units and tactical options.
The single-player campaigns that come with the game are pretty nifty. There's a Korean campaign set in ancient times, a German Campaign that starts during the Crusades and moves through the Napoleonic era, and an American Campaign that starts in the late 19th century and ends up in the 21st, encompassing both World Wars, the Cold War, and a near-future cyborg rebellion.
As should be obvious, the Campaigns cover an enormous amount of territory. To me, one of the most interesting things about the Empire Earth franchise is its laissez-faire attitude towards the question of scale. With most RTS, your scale might be single-unit tactical or global political/economic domination, but it always stays the same. Empire Earth, is different. A scenario involving about the same number of units on about the same size playing field can represent everything from a single battlefield to most of a continent. This gives the game an enviable versatility, but it can also be disconcerting - and probably drive a certain type of highly-organized mind totally nuts. Fortunately for The Game Duffer, my mind is not nearly so demanding.
One of the neat things in the campaign is the concept of Crowns. If you take the lead over your opponents in any one of three categories (military, economic, political) you win a Crown, which allows you to select an appropriate tactical advantage for yourself. Every so often the game re-tallies the Crown competition, and if you keep the Crown you can keep your advantage, or select a new one. Although The Game Duffer makes it a rule to stay far away from multi-player RTS competition, he can see that the crown system would add even more to multiplayer than it does to campaign play.
There's an awful lot to keep track of here, and the biggest drawback to the game is that it's not always easy to find the information you need. There's a manual, and there's an in-game encyclopedia of game units and concepts, but neither one of them is really friendly, particularly for a game of this complexity. The tutorial's very good, but it only takes you so far. Much of the time, The Game Duffer had to deduce how to do something directly from the interface, then apply it to the game through trial and error. For an easy-going sort like The Game Duffer, this wasn't fun, and I'll bet a power gamer would find it even more annoying.
Like its predecessor, Empire Earth II is a sprawling, ambitious and flexible simulation. It requires some thought and patience to master, and it can be a bit frustrating along the way, but The Game Duffer recommends it to everybody from the reasonably persistent novice to the hard-core RTS fanatic.
