I have been very excited about the release of "Age of Empires III" for a while now and was ecstactic when the demo was released for download from the offical website. Once it was installed I wasted no time in starting the game up, I was expecting to see the standard of graphics featured in the "AOE 3" screen shots but was bitterly disappointed to find otherwise. The graphics apart from nice lighting and better physics was exactly (in my eyes) the same as "Age of Mythology" but I failed to take two factors into consideration.

1. Games almost never look as good as they do in the screen shots.

2. My computer isn't in very good shape and needs badly upgraded.

So I decided to install the game on my brothers computer (which is far superior) and see if the graphics had improved and they certainly did. My graphics card doesn't support dynamic lighting or pixel shaders 3.0 but my brothers does and the game looked simply amazing and looked more similar to graphics found in the screen shots. Anyway enough of the graphics, lets talk about the gameplay. Think of the combat as "Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds" this time with muskets instead of blasters. The gameplay looks and feels like "AOE 2" with improved graphics, it has the same resources , same basic combat and the same interface .Even the game's theme music sounds the same as it's predecessor.

But once I had the graphics up to standard, I was still disappointed with the gameplay in general which has almost not been touched in five years. Although criticisms aside this is still a demo so hopefully "Ensemble Studios" held back a lot of the features till the actual full release of the game. *Fingers crossed*