Just so that you know, Empire Earth demo has been released.

[Grunthex]

http://www.fileplanet.com/index.asp?file=80809

I used one of the London sites. Got about 24k/sec. If you were willing to stand in line for the US sites, might get faster. Course, I was primetime too. Might be faster midnight.

[Patriqvium]

I didn't like the demo.

The gameplay was a bit unintuitive and the graphics were pretty mediocre for a 3D game. Besides, I personally didn't like the unit balancing system (which was a rock-paper-scissors variant). It seems a bit strange that a battleship has no chance against a galley (the damage caused was minimal) but then sinks a much sturdier frigate with a few shots. Guess there's a point behind this, but the idea was made so absolute it became ridiculous...

[tishco]

i was a bit disapointed with the "3d"
youi could only zoom to first perseon and out, but not out further. i suppose that is better than just rotating, but if you have such a good zoom, why leave it at that?
the men look a bit rubbish up close, they all have rigure smiles which are the kind of thing you see on horror games with zombies, and the limp and different walking paterns the mags said about wernt there.
the unit system was to complicated, and sometimes the things with the adavantage lost easily to their weaker counterparts whio were supposed to lose!
shogun does it was better, its just spears kill horse, archers kill spear, and hosrse kill archers. the reast are just extreme attack or defenderers.
just age of empires 3 really! age of mythology, the officail aoe3 looks better although more limited (it only has the originals timespan)

[August Borms]

Bah, it crashes when I try to start a tutorial/scenario

[Grumbold]

I have to agree with Patriqvium about the unit balancing system. It seemed to me that they have managed to squeeze numerous epochs into a single game because they did not care how badly they ballsed up the reality of any of them. Bow beats Pike beats Sword beats Bow. Yeucch. Three thousand years of military history completely mutilated there in one fell stroke, but it is repeated as a theme in all areas of conflict. I've never uninstalled anything so fast in my life!

That may not be a problem for some, so I'll mention a few more observations. When building walls it was easy to mis-connect parts unless you spent time rotating and zooming the view. End-towers would appear at odd intervals as you tried to build segments. Gates are enormous, probably so that the AI can spot them and prevent them from being killing fields. Selecting troops and clicking on a ship won't load units on transports, they stop on the shore.

On the up-side, its a very ambitious and nice looking game which ran smoothly on my PC. Just not one I will be buying.

[Richard Bruns]

I was extremely disappointed with this game. It is technically incompetent, ugly, horribly inaccurate, and simply not fun.

First, it wouldn't run at all until I shut down ZoneAlarm. Why should a firewall interfere with a single player demo? This forewall never interfered with anything else before; why is this game connecting to the internet without my permission?

The tutorial was so bad I shut down the game and uninstalled it. First, the thing was ponderously and ittitatingly slow. That idiot talked and talked, and I couldn't shut him off or speed up the game. There were no instructions for pausing the game, changing speed and settings, or any other basic stuff. I had to sit there, bored out of my skull, while it went through stuff any strategy player knows while giving no instructions for running the game.

The game is ugly. All the characters look hideous, as do the farms and buildings and practically everything else. The graphics in Warcraft 2 were better than this junk.

And as mentioned before, the combat system is hideous. There are simply no words to describe the horribly stupid and inaccurate paper-rocks-scissors thing. It is unbelievably incompetent. Do they really expect me to believe that a heavily armed group of hoplites will get mauled in hand to hand combat by a few stupid archers? What about the Parthian wars, where roman legions got shot to bits by a group of horse archers a seventh their size? In the game that could never happen thanks to their hideous combat system.

In short, I've never seen such a bad game. Do not buy it.