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Age Of Empires III Review
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Manufacturer: Destineer
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ESRB Rating: Teen
Platform(s): Macintosh
Release Date: November 21, 2006
Average Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
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User Submitted Age Of Empires III Reviews
Date: 2008-11-30
Good Sequel; Better With Expansions
I first received this game about 2 years ago as a birthday present. From then on it has evolved to become my standard of a good RTS. The graphical, and game play improvement over AO2 is amazing. The home city is a vast improvement over AO2, and forces you to specialize in one civilization in order to unlock all of their advantages. My brothers also enjoy this game, so when they play me over our LAN network it keeps both of us on our toes and always guessing, much like real combat. The game does pull some controls out of other games, such as being able to zoom in yet it is actually a bit of a hassle since it gives you no advantage, and the movement often become blurry when you do this. One feature that the game is missing from AOM is the ability to pan the camera. You are still stuck facing the game from one angle. This makes it very difficult to view units behind buildings.
I run the game on my iMac (1.83 ghz, 512mb RAM) and I can still run the game under the medium graphics with no apparent lag. While playing on my macbook (2.4 ghz, 2gb RAM) I run the game on the highest settings, and the graphical improvement is amazing. The water ripples with every movement of my ships, and the smoke from my rows of dragoons slowly ripples towards the sky and then dissipates. Even in maps where there is fog there is no lag, unlike COD2 where you throw a smoke grenade in a big map and you will receive lag.
I often play as the British on expert, and sometimes the game is actually rather easy for me; I often win matches of 1v7. The AI is very predicable lacking the options that were in AOM such as big boomer, and early rusher. A simple strategy is to just create a big army, wait for them to attack, then demolish there city before they can regroup. In your capital one has the option to block all shipments from the enemies home cities. This in multi-player games is one of my least liked features. (I believe that this is solved though in the later expansions.) All one has to do is activate this "power" and the opponent cannot receive any shipments. This is extremely unfair because on the death match setting players can use this ability instantaneously.
The game does have some minor bugs, and glitches which are solved in the expansions, such as asking for resources from your allies over time, but all in all it is a very solid game. Using cheats is never fair for your opponents, yet you can spawn a monster truck, or create an invincible "George Crushington". The editor is still notoriously hard to use in setting up the AI's abilities, and the map is actually circular in this game. This is a weird thing to do since walls cannot directly match up to the borders.
I love this game and I know I will be playing it for a couple more years. I have both of the expansion packs and they add a new level to the game play. This game is NOT a waste of money, and will definetely keep an Age of Empires fan satisfied.
Date: 2008-10-04
The Perfect Time Waster
Age of Empires 3 is an awesome game with it's high-resolution graphics, new game-play, and deep story-line, but it IS NOT just a game. This is where spare time is meant to go. Microsoft has had some great ideas in the past, but the AoE series are honestly some of the best games I have ever played. This game will have you playing non-stop and I personally guarantee you will love every minute of it!
Date: 2008-09-19
A&E III
anyone how liked A&E II will love this game It works grate on the MAC with the improved graphics are grate!
Date: 2008-08-04
Terrible, worse than the last edition!
This game is not an improvement over the previous edition. I would not recommend buying this.
Reasons why it sucks:
-The graphics aren't that great.
-You can only see a small area of the playing field at once.
-You have to build up civilizations over time, you can't take full advantage of their attributes immediately.
-I hate the card system, it's lame.
-You can't double-click to select all the units of one type in an area.
-No real improvements over the last game, just different. As in crappier.
Date: 2008-07-05
Excellent But Archers on the Plains of Abraham?
This is an excellent strategy game. I am very interested in colonial and Eighteenth Century warfare so I enjoy the era and the animations of musket loading pioneers and soldiers. It mimics linear tactics although it is not an exact reproduction. The naval warfare is also good although you will not see ships in linear formation.
There is a definite improvement over Age of Empires II in that there are very real differences between the cultures that require differing strategies when playing different nations. I really like how they were able to make it so that particular nations have an edge in certain periods. For example the Spaniards and the Ottomans are stronger in the colonial age while the other nations such as the British and French begin to excel in the fortress and industrial ages. There are more nation specific technologies than in the earlier version and there is no denying certain what I would call basic technologies to certain nations to create variation.
I like buildings that will produce resources continuously such as mills and plantations, and factories, rather than relying on mines that are eventually "dried up." The shipments from the home cities is an interesting feature although "additions" to those cities seems to be little more than "decorating."
My quibbles with the game have nothing to do with game play but more to do with historical accuracy. One of the British special units is the longbowman, also featured in the earlier AoE2. The computer will continue to produce this unit well into the industrial age of the game because it remains cheap and effective. I want to battle against redcoats, not medieval yeomen! Pikemen and halberdiers are other soldiers that will be produced "years" after the socket bayonet made this type of unit worthless in real European warfare.
I wonder at some of their choices of colonizing nations--the Turks never colonized America--but perhaps they were already planning their later versions such as the Asian Dynasties. The Swedes might have been a better choice than the Germans; I don't think much of Frederick the Great commanding armies of swordsmen rather than musketeers (fusiliers). I also think Louis XIV would have been a better representative of France than Napoleon for the colonization of America.
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