Empire Earth is a strategy game made by Sierra Studios released in 2001. Covering 500,000 years, this game allows you to play through all of human history and gives its players a wide variety of choices to make throughout the game. Allowing you to fight on land, sea and in the air, there really isn’t another strategy game quite like it.

*** My Opinion on … ***

Here you will find my opinion on everything from how easy the game is to play and what age range this would suit, to how good the graphics are and how it compares to similar games of its type. Hopefully this will give you the best idea of whether or not this game is for you!

1) What’s the difference between this and other games of its type?

Empire Earth is most like the game ‘Age of Empires’ in the way that you can choose to play the role of different civilisations and you have to battle other civilisations to win the game.

You have citizens which you have to use to gather resources that you need and you also have to have either a settlement or a capitol to place the resources in after you have gathered them. This isn’t just a game where you send men out to gather resources and they just magically appear in your status bar, here the men actually have to place them into the appropriate place.

Building plays a big part in this game too. You have to build buildings such as a barracks (just like in Age of Empires and The Settlers), a dock and temples. As with Age of Empires you can upgrade to different ages which will in turn upgrade your fighters and your buildings. Upgrading will ultimately improve your chances of beating your opponents.

So the theory of the game is the same as a lot of other strategy games but the options within the game are what make Empire Earth really stand out.

2) The Options

As mentioned at the beginning of this review, Empire Earth allows the player to play over a period of 500,000 years of human history. This allows you a wide variety of options while playing. There are over 200 different combat units including cavalry, tanks, submarines, battleships and helicopters. You can even fight with missiles.

While playing a campaign game, when you complete certain aspects of the campaign you are awarded with points and you can use these points to upgrade your empire in a variety of ways. One of those ways could be to make your civilians faster. You don’t have to spend all the points you earn however as some things that you can upgrade need quite a few points and sometimes it is a good idea to save points up in order to afford them.

The battle options are the widest options available but the option to upgrade to new ages is pretty good. I love expanding everything and upgrading it. You cannot just upgrade things without resources though so you always need civilians gathering them.

3) Resources

If you are new to strategy games then you will have no idea what I’m talking about when I say ‘resources’. Basically resources are things that are used to create everything from buildings to cavalry and to upgrade to new ages and to research new things.

The resources in this game are:

* Food
* Wood
* Stones
* Gold
* Iron

Each resource is used differently by each option for example; a certain amount of food is used with wood, gold or iron to create a military unit such as a spearman. Another example is you need wood along with iron to build certain buildings. So my advice is to always be gathering all resources in your settlement area.

4) Single Player or Multiplayer

Upon loading the game you can choose whether you want to play as a single player or a multiplayer. I’ve never played as a multiplayer but the options available there are playing in a network, playing with a certain IP address, Hosting your own network game or playing on the internet. If you want to play on the internet you will have to have your Empire Earth CD key handy which can be found on your CD case that the game came in. I personally would never play over the internet as I have issues over how safe it is.

So I always play a single player game and there are a few options to choose from so you don’t get bored quickly. I always play the campaign option but you can also choose to play a random map which would be handy if you didn’t have much time and you just wanted a quick game. There is also the option to play the learning tutorials or a custom campaign.

If you have never played this game or any other game like it, it is advised to start with the learning tutorials. There are eight different scenarios included which all aim to teach you how to do everything you will need in order to play the game. Now when I first started playing I didn’t bother with the tutorials and I started with one of the campaigns. Now this wasn’t really a big problem for me as I had played similar games to this and I knew pretty much most of what I had to do. However, I did get a bit stuck and finally decided to play some of the tutorials just to see if I was doing anything wrong. I wasn’t and it just turned out to be a hard level but I still enjoyed the tutorials and it passed a bit of time. Be warned though that the tutorials do take a little time to complete, I’d say all eight will take at least half an hour. However, luckily this game saves your information every time you complete a tutorial or campaign and the next time you load the game up it lets you carry on from where you left off. It does this automatically without you having to save it and it means you don’t have to complete all the tutorials if you don’t have time.

If you choose to play the campaigns you will find that there are four different ones to choose from. There’s the Greek campaign, the English campaign, the German campaign and the Russian campaign. I haven’t tried all of these yet but I have tried the English one and I’m currently on the Greek one. When the campaign overview loads up it doesn’t show you how many scenarios there is in each campaign. It simply just shows the first scenario and you click start to begin. It does tell you about the campaign though and the basic idea of what you have to do but until you complete your first scenario it doesn’t tell you how many scenarios altogether there are. After completing the first scenario in Greek I have found out that there are eight to complete. Whether this is the same in all of the campaigns I’ve no idea but either way there is still quite a few hours of game play there!

As well as the campaigns already designed for you, there is also an option to play a custom campaign. This basically means you can create your own campaign but you have to do this in the game tools section when the game first loads up. Three options will be available to you if you do click on game tools and they are: scenario builder, civilization builder and campaign editor. Now in order to edit your campaign you need to first go to the scenario editor and create a map from scratch. The map will load up with nothing but grass everywhere and there are several options available to you to create a scenario. These options include ground level where you can raise or lower the ground, how many players you want in that scenario, what units you want and you can type out the story and instructions for that scenario. This could provide you with hours of fun and I know my boyfriend would love this section.

After creating your scenario you can then go to civilization builder and that will allow you to decide what your civilization will start off with. You get 100 points to spend and you can make units faster, be able to hit harder or you can make buildings stronger against enemy attacks. There is almost an unlimited amount that you can spend your points on so choose wisely!

Finally after creating your scenario and spending your points you should click on the campaign editor button and add which scenarios you want included and what you want your campaign to be called. As I said I have never tried doing this but it is something I will be doing when I complete the ready made ones!

So you can play either a multiplayer game or a single player game and either way you will have hours of entertainment!

5) How hard is the game?

Now I absolutely loved the settler’s heritage of kings but one complaint I would have is that it could be a little easy sometimes. However I have found the campaigns in this game to be quite challenging. I had to stop playing the English campaign because I was on the first level and I just couldn’t get what I had to do, I had to search for some stones and I simply could not find them! Instead I just kept getting killed so I decided to try the Greek campaign. I have managed to complete the first level of that though it wasn’t easy! Now on the second level I have had to restart quite a few times as I keep getting defeated. Each time I have to restart though I learn something new about what I’m doing wrong and I aim to do things differently next time. So although this can get a little frustrating, it still keeps the mind working and you get further every time you have to restart.

I wouldn’t say the game was too hard though. As challenging as it is, it is still really playable and slightly addictive. Also if you don’t fancy starting right from scratch once you are defeated, there is the option to save the game at any time and start from where you left off. Another handy feature of the game is the auto save. Every so often the game saves itself automatically so you can always load up from when it last saved itself. You can change the frequency of the auto save feature through the game options button at the start of the game menu.

All in all I’d say the difficulty of this game makes it more appealing to me. It means it will be more of a challenge to complete meaning more hours of game play. There’s nothing worse than a game that is too easy.

6) Graphics

The fact that the game was released in 2001 tells us that the graphics aren’t going to be as good as some of the latest games available, for example age of empires III. However they aren’t terrible and I wouldn’t say I am put off by the graphics. They aren’t too basic and they aren’t overly great but the picture is still quite clear and the way the cavalry move is quite realistic.

If you don’t expect too much you will not be disappointed. It is worth mentioning that there is an Empire Earth II out now which I am tempted to buy and I’m sure the graphics will have improved on it too.

7) What is required to play the game?

If you are tempted to play the game then you will want to know what you will need in order to play it.

Obviously you need a DVD drive in order to play the disc. Apart from that though you apparently need a Multimedia PC with Pentium II – 350 MHz or higher processor. You need 64MB Ram and an additional 100MB of space. A 3D video card and a 16 bit colour resolution. You need a mouse and also a Direct X compatible sound card.
To be honest that doesn’t mean much to me as I aren’t really a techie kind of person but I’m sure that will be helpful to some people. Personally I buy a game and if it doesn’t work I take it back! I think if this plays on my laptop it should play on quite a few PCs.

7) Price and Availability

I actually borrowed this game by accident instead of age of empires III but you can find this from places like the game shop for around £10. It isn’t very widely available as the second one is now out and people prefer to buy that one. My recommendation would be to look on the internet on sites such as Ebay and Amazon where you will pay a lot less than you would on the high street.

*** My overall opinion ***

I would recommend this game to anyone who loves strategy games. This is probably aimed more at guys but I have to admit I really like it! Another thing I didn’t mention was that in the game options section at the beginning of the start menu, you can choose to turn the blood shown to off. This helps if you are giving this to a younger person. However I would have to say that not much blood is shown, it is only a bit of red colour every time a unit is hit, it isn’t anything gory. Still the choice is there and I feel that makes it a useful option for parents. The game is aimed at people aged 12+ and I’d agree with that due to the fighting that is involved. However, as I said the game isn’t gruesome compared to a lot of other games.

I particularly love how the game isn’t too easy and that it provides literally hours of entertainment. It is going to take me ages to complete this game and to me that is good value for money if you buy it. I’m glad I have this one first so that when I buy the second one I will be able to compare the two and see exactly how much it has improved if it has at all.

I hope this review has been helpful to you and again I would recommend this game to everyone. Thanks for reading!

Aimee xxx