Age of Empires III

I just recently got AOE 3 for Christmas (indirectly, but for Christmas anyhow), and installed it on my computer. For those of you who don’t know exactly what it is, heres a brief explanation.

It is a RTS (real-time strategy) game, set in the 1700’s to mid 1800’s, although in the campaign you start somewhere around the 1500’s, I would guess. The basic way to play the game is to build up your city and resources by using your settlers to collect wood, coin, and food, then build up an army and conquer your enemies, who are trying to do the same to you. Thats the extreme basics.

In AOE 3 a new feature is the Home City, which you can use to recieve supplies from. The supplies come in the form of cards, certain cards containing certain things such as food, so many soldeirs, and the like. You can only use so many cards at a time also. The Home City feature is actually kind of nice, as it allows you to build up your economy and forces quicker.

Another new feature to AOE 3 is that in every game there is some sort of hero. The hero can be used to gather treasure from various treasure spots dotted all over the map, and he has a special ability of some sort. The nice thing about heros is that they never die, if their health bar runs too low than they collapse and can’t move, until another one of you persons (calvary, infantry, settlers, artillery) “rescue” them.

One of the best part of AOE 3 is the graphics. At first I was dissapointed, because I had seen screenshots of the game and they looked really good, but once I had loaded the game, it looked pretty cheesy. Thankfully, once I adjusted the graphics settings, it looked great! You do need a pretty good graphics card though.

But the graphics during a battle are pretty neat. Cannon will launch cannon balls into buildings, and building pieces go flying everywhere. Infantry, when hit by cannon balls, will do the same, even flying of cliffs and into the water if the terrain is so set up.

The campaigns are really good too. The campaign follows a fictional family, the Blacks, and their different generations. It is broken into three acts, each act containing 10 or more seperate missons that proceed like a story. Each mission is preceeded and followed by a small animated video leads in/out of the mission. The missions themselves are nice as in some you do things that you wouldn’t do in your regular random map game.

All in all I enjoy playing AOE 3. It doesn’t take as long to gather up resources, which results in a faster built army and more action. The Home City, heroes, and treasures are a nice addition also. 1-5 with 5 being the best, I would give Age of Empires 3 a 4 1/2.

Graphics-5

Gameplay-3

Blood/Gore-1 (not a lot)

Campaign-4

Inappropriatness-1 (rare)

~ by Will Claybourne on January 26, 2008.