The strategy genre is proving as hard to be innovative in, as the first-person shooter has become in recent years. Within moments of looking at the screenshots of a new game you can tell whether it’s going to fall into the admittedly rather fun Command + Conquer category with its emphasis on action rather than strategy. Or, it’ll be a rather more sedate experience, which only the die-hard strategists out there will enjoy. Empire Earth II comes along aiming to bring with it not only the action required to make a game enjoyable but also the depth and strategic options that a game set across the entire breadth of human life will naturally bring with it.
The game has a good pedigree as the original was designed by Rick Goodman of Age of Empires fame. Naturally, as you’d expect from a sequel, EEII continues in much the same vein. There’s quite simply heaps of things to do throughout the game on top of the usual fighting, there’s also buildings that need to be constructed, new technologies to be researched and resources gathered. It’s standard fare but it’s undoubtedly an intoxicating cocktail of game elements.
However, there are some noticeable differences in the gameplay that bring some much-needed depth to proceedings. Each map is split into different territories which you can only claim as your own once you’ve built a City Centre within the boundaries of that territory. This then gives you benefits such as the ability to build more units and gives you bases across the whole map from which you can launch your strategic attacks. It is a slight shame that the borders don’t work as they do in Rise of Nations in that they’re fixed in position and don’t expand or shrink depending on how successful you are.
Another nice touch is the way diplomacy has been implemented. The game actively encourages you to create alliances rather than simply trying to blitz your way past everyone. Once you make a successful alliance you can then create action plans for your new friends to follow and suggest attacks for them to make on your enemies by a series of waypoints. They may not necessarily decide to follow your plan but the fact that they might opens up a whole world of new tactical options for you.
It’s not simply just a case of trying to get through to each new period of time as quickly as possible either as this negates certain technologies you can research. For example, you need to research six technologies in each period to progress to the next one – of which there are 14 in total. However, each time period has a total of twelve available technologies to research and once you’ve progressed to the next stage not all of those technologies will still be available to you.
You also have to be a bit smarter when it comes to planning your attacks. For example, once you’ve built an outpost you’ll be kept informed of how the weather’s doing and whether or not a storm is on its way. Should a storm be coming for the same time as your planned attack then it may be wise to hold off for a little while and wait until its passed.
So it’s good and we like it, however, we were somewhat disappointed with the graphics and what is best described as a rather out-dated engine. To be fair it can accommodate a lot of units on screen and there’s little slow down, but the animations are poor and explosions don’t have the necessary impact to really draw you into the game. Especially when compared against similar titles that have been released recently and the game really fades away.
Arguably a bigger problem however is the lack of cohesion that affects the single player game. There are three separate campaigns to play through however we’ve become spoilt in recent times and expect something a little more dynamic with our campaigns. We like our risk style game maps and the lack of choice available to you throughout the campaign is disappointing. In it’s favour there is a great skirmish mode with heaps of options available to you and naturally extensive multiplayer options.
If you can look past these issues however there’s definitely a quality game here with some new and innovative features. Perhaps it’s not a huge step-forwards and it may get lost in the midst of all the other similar games however there’s no doubting we’ll be seeing a lot more of its best features in future games.
An excellent sequel
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