Could have been better...

User Rating: 5 | Empire Earth II PC
By Dematrion | Review Date:
Maybe it’s my fault; I thought I liked RTS games like this. And maybe it's because I'm a little older now, and I don't have the time nor the patience to deal with them. But this one strikes me the wrong way, in a “ you just wasted 3 hours only to have the AI stick it to you “ kinda way. First, this game has the disease that Starcraft has, although everyone seems to like that one too: the AI knows where everything is from the start, and you don’t. Well, only if you haven’t played that particular map 80 times. So since the AI knows the terrain w/o exploring, you’re at a distinct disadvantage. To get past this, you have to conduct research, resource gathering, and production, in a STATIC order; that means this order cannot change, and if it does, you die. This sounds more like work than fun, doesn’t it?
In addition, it seems to me that the AI can do a lot with very little. Some of us call this cheating. But for those of you that don’t, the AI seems to have more units, resources (obviously) and technology than they do buildings to produce them, or in some cases time or resources to produce units. For example, I was playing a game in which during Epoch II I was conducting a raid on the AI’s island, with my fleet of 5 ships. It was a short distance and I had just repelled an attack. I start to sail and run into ANOTHER fleet of 12 ships, just after I had destroyed 8. I lost my entire army. I didn’t know that much tin existed on the map! The AI also likes playing with about a dozen priests in every attack (yea, that’s fun).

As simple as they are, I prefer RTS games like Warhammer 40K DOW, or Rise and Fall: Civilizations at war. Why? Because they’re exciting to play: from the tactics used, to the music to the variety of play. When I play a game, I don’t wanna work. I have plenty of that, thank you very much.

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