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What a disappointment.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: December 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

After seeing the previews showing real-life graphics and untimately a completely new AOE I had to admit, I was blown away. It seemed that another addicting AOE game was on its way...

Positive:
1.) You've most likely already heard it before, AMAZING graphics. Right? Well, it's true. They're great because the water looks real, the people really move like people, and overall things look more realistic.
2.) The music is still pretty good (because we all know we love it).
3.) You still gather resources the way you always have. (Wood? Cut the trees. Food? Kill the sheep.)
4.) You can really see the people (ex. faces, clothes, gender...etc).
5.) The battles and destruction of buildings is incredible. People really fly when hit, buildings slowly fall to pieces, and men yell when shot. Every aspect of this part of the game is exceptional.

Negative:
1.) You are allowed to zoom in and out of the screen, but in this case your farthest zoom is VERY close to the overall amount you are allowed to see. I felt as though I had to move away to see more of my colony even though I could not.
2.) When the villagers cut wood or mine, they stand there and continue cutting the same tree for a long period of time until they are completely done and then move on. It's almost hilarious to see five settlers chopping at the same tree for minutes at a time!
3.) The feeling that we love about this game is lost. Microsoft changes the whole fun of protecting your city and watching it grow. They limit you to how many outposts you can build and there are no storages for the food like there used to be. You build one building and all the people work on that one building gathering resources from it. It's not like before when they would chop a tree and actually CARRY the wood back to the town center or storage.

Summary: You're not reading this review from someone that's playing an AOE game for the first time. I'm a huge fan from way back when the very first AOE came out, when I would stay up until the morning playing. I used to look forward to seeing the same old AOE come out just something newer and upgraded. To say the least, I'm disappointed because all they have done is try to impress their fans with graphics and lost the true feel of AOE. We already have enough games that have gone beyond impressing us with graphics. Hopefully Microsoft will find a way to bring back the original feeling of the game because I won't be playing AOE 3 anymore.

Don't Believe the Listed System Requirements

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 17
Date: January 16, 2006
Author: Amazon User

My system meets the nearly invisible system requirements microscopicly printed on the box but it still would not install because it detected an "unsupported video card." Turns out the README file contains a huge list of video cards they already know won't work but of course you can't see that list until you open the box.

Not just more of the same, too much of it..

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: December 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I loved Age of Empires and AOE2 and all their expansion packs. It was never quite as dynamic and exciting as Command and Conquer but the graphics were far superior and C&C for me went down a rat hole and became over complex with its "veteran units" etc. Age of Mythology added "heroes" who could not die (at least in the single player missions) and added "mana" as an addition resource to be collected, which started to get tedious.

AOEIII adds to this with the explorer, who again has special powers and cannot die. It looses the Mana and also stone collecting so there is only gold, wood and food to worry about. It also adds the home city, outposts, treasure and the concept of experience.

After a few hours of gameplay however it becomes apparent that its mostly like AOEII, with almost a one to one correlation between the old units and buildings and the new ones. Ironically most of the "improvements" actually make it worse. The new features just add more things to worry about, and distract you from your main objectives, plus you can only build one fortress and 7 towers which makes base defense a real issue - and I used to love the "tower rush". After another few hours of gameplay I had the whole thing sussed and concluded I had nothing more to learn.

The graphics are awesome, so much so that they can bring even the most capable machine to its knees, but they add little or nothing to the game play. Worse, though I could happily run AOEII on a 1999 laptop at 1280*1024 resolution, I could not run at that same resolution on my 2.8GHz Athlon machine even with my Radeon 9800 pro graphics card.

My ideal game for this Genre would still be the original Command and Conquer with AOEII graphics. AOE3 is at best more of the same, at worst too much of it.

Great graphics but...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: February 26, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Microsoft's game Age Of Empires III is a great new look for their Age of Empires series. At first I was blown away by the amazing graphics and new features. As a game set in the age of colonization, there a several new features such as being able to recieve goods and reinforcements from your home city. Unfortunatly, I don't think this game is as fun as the original versions. I expected the different civilizations to be a little more diverse as far as units and capabilities were concerned. I was also dissapointed by the lack of maps available for play after one has beaten the story line game. After you've beaten the game, it really loses its charm. I can still play Age of Empires I and II over and over again, I'm really not able to with this one.

Tried hard to like it but...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: October 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've played this series and all of its expansion packs. Also, I'm a great fan of the colonial age. Having been only just barely convinced by reading reviews NOT to get the collectors edition, I feel "lucky." It's a beautiful game but the thing it had always had, game play, just isn't present this time around. I'm truly sad to say that.

The worlds are much smaller and the options for playing far more constraining. The AI is passable but makes the game feel unimaginative ending up with a "been there, done that feeling."

Unfortunately, the games single greatest asset is its graphics. Since it's not a picture, this isn't a good thing. I expect my strategy games to be engrossing with that "just a little more time or one more turn feel." However, AoE3 almost had may saying "am I done yet?"

I was on vacation recently so I also picked up Shattered Union and Knights of Honor. Much better value in my opinion for either. Shattered Union is more light weight strategy and Knights of Honor is hard core through and through.

Not bad at all!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: November 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I was a little antsy about picking up this title. A lot of the reviews are extremely mixed and offered up a wide variety of pros and cons for this game. I became a hard boiled fan of AOE1 way back when it first came out and you'd often find me facing off with friends via LAN while my Phonecian war elephants ran amok through their ranks. AOE2 was even better, allowing better tactics for your infantry and cavalry as well as great seige equipment and castles. So what new suprises lurk in AOE3?

Well, the most obvious one that comes to mind is of course your home city. Bear in mind that this game takes place during the Imperial years, when the different nations of Europe began looking for new countries to colonize overseas. Your home city is more or less like your "sponsor", providing you with regular upgrades to your army, navy, and settlers. Constructing buildings, finding special landmarks, and killing enemies acrue experience points, and after accumulating so many you'll hit pre-determined points where you can cash them in for free shipments from your home city. Some of these can take the form of military units or raw materials, and sometimes buildings. After getting a whole lot of experience points your city goes up in level and you can buy items called "cards". Said "cards" can be built into a deck (kind of like a weird Magic:The Gathering thing) of free military units and upgrades which you can customize to the environment you wish to fight in. For instance, as the Dutch my military tends to be strong on skirmishers and naval units, so by buying the right cards I can hire a group of skirmishers to go over to my colony for free. Likewise I can send a large fort to help protect my frontiers. By saving up for the really good cards I can hire privateers to raid enemy shipping.

Indiginous native tribes (nicely done, each tribe is map specific. Fighting in old Carolina you'll ally with Cherokee; in the Yukon it'll be the Nootka tribe, etc. You'll learn to love/hate the Iriqouis Mantlet unit) can be allied with to give you even more unit flexibility and upgrades. Even more there are "trade routes" and if you set up trading posts along these routes you regularly gain free exp everytime the trade cart comes by. If you reach the proper levels you can upgrade the simple travois trade system to a stagecoach, and ultimately to a locomotive system, getting you exp even faster. Needless to say the trade routes are highly sought after in any game and add a nice touch to the overall experience.

Military units are often nation-specific and that too is a great touch to this game. I love sending large groups of Veteran Ruytens (Dutch cavalry armed with pistols) on raids against enemy settlers. The Russians have a specialized artillery called the War Wagon, basically a cannon encapsulated in a coach that gets pulled around the battlefield (and wreaks serious havoc, let me tell you). The Ottomans have cool rocket artillery that they can lay down surprisingly ferocious assaults with. These units are again nation-specific and make me want to try out a number of these different empires to see firsthand what the strengths and weaknesses are.

On the domestic side Settlers, your basic jack-of-all-trades unit, can do the standard resource gathering. Mines, trees, and herds of animals to hunt are sprinkled liberally over most mapsets. If you run out of resources on a particular map there are still options to continue this resource building via the construction of Mills (food) or Plantations (gold). Should you choose to buy the Factory card (highly recommended) you can freely harvest any resource in the game at the touch of a button.

Online play is offered via Ensemble's own gaming net, kind of like Battlenet but with a few less frills. Network lag is an issue with most games I've played in. It's a lot of fun going head to head with human players and many games will turn almost into bedlam with lots of mass attacks, feints, and artillery displays that will leave most gasping for air.

There are some drawbacks to the game though. While you can arrange your armies into formations once the fighting starts they seldom hold it and often scatter in different directions. For instance, while my skirmishers and artillery tend to hold the line reasonably well I can expect my Halberdiers (guys wielding massive, hard-hitting polearms) and often my cavalry to just run amok and get picked off singly. This is sadly compounded by the limited view you have of the map. When your army starts to spread out too thin you'll spend far too much time trying to redirect them back into formation, and all too often having them do so gets them shot in the back as they amble back into ranks at half speed. Were there the option to zoom out just a *little* bit this would alleviate many combat issues. In addition to this problem there's also an issue I have with artillery. You can order them to attack a certain enemy position or building but oftentimes after the first salvo they'll fire independently at random targets. While sometimes this isn't bad, like when they're being charged by a squadron of Hussars they'll sometimes fire at these incoming threats. Other times they continue bombarding a small building oblivious to the line of Pikemen coming over the rise with cannon-killing fervor in their eyes.

Still this is a fantastic game. It took a little getting used to to be sure, but I have found myself pleasantly addicted to this great game and I'm already looking for more. :)

Far and away the best game of last year

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: June 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Age of Empires III was largely slagged in the press for being "more of the same" and outclassed by the likes of such titles as Rise of Nations and Civ IV. Ironically enough, it also seems that some publications criticized Age of Empires III for straying too far from what Age II was. All that I can say is that they couldn't be further from the truth. Not only is Age III the best game -- console or PC -- that I played in the year 2005, it is one of the best games of all time, even surpassing its illustrious predecessors. It is fresh, it is polished, and it's one of the best damn games I've ever played (and believe me, I've played a lot of them).

I've been a fan of the RTS genre for awhile -- mainly the AoE series. From its inception to now, I've always purchased an Age of Empires game as soon as it's released. Ensemble Studios staffs some of the hardest working, brightest people in the industry, and it shows in their work. I've tried other RTS games, such as Starcraft, Civ II, and Rise of Nations, but none could hold my attention like the ESO team can.

The single player game in Age of Empires III will be familiar to anyone who played Age of Mythology (another classic, in its own right). You progress through a series of missions/civilizations, are told a fantastically unrealistic (and very entertaining) story, and learn about the game's nuances and intracies. Basically, the single player campaign serves one purpose: as a prep course for the real meat of the game, which is playing online. The single player is decent, but if that's all that you're going to play, then don't buy Age of Empires III.

Before I begin my pontifications about multiplayer, I'd like to address the technical side of the game. Ensemble is known for pushing the envelope in games -- look at the visual quality of the rest of the Age games as a reference -- and Age III is no exception. The graphics, even when turned down, are beautiful. The civilizations each have a unique architectural style, and the game is litterred with bloom lighting, brilliant shadows, amazing animation, and an absolutely unbelievable physics engine. Shoot a cannon into a group of soldiers, and watch as they scream out in pain and fly across the map. Attack a tower, and watch as the wood and thatch fly off the roof. It's a sight to behold, and really adds to the battles a lot. No skirmish -- or war -- will look exactly the same, and while it may sound like a small detail, it adds to the game's longevity. Oh, and did I mention the water? It is, quite simply, the best water ever witnessed in a video game. Sound wise, the cannons have nice, meaty explosions that accompany each of their blasts, the muskets sound like guns being fired, and the standard voice-overs for each civ (in their native language) is a nice touch as well. Nothing revolutionary, but all very solid. I turned the music down in favor of my own tunes, but by no means is it bad either; in fact, it's quite good.

Since performance seems to be one of the biggest problems for people, I'm dedicating an entire paragraph to it (along with my experiences). I've been running the game at 1280x1024, on a system with an AMD 64 3200+, nVidia 6800GT, and 2 GB Corsair XMS RAM. I built the system from scratch myself at the time of the game's release. Cost? Twelve hundred bucks. Anyone claiming that they can't get this game to run well is either incompetent or lying; I had everything but antialiasing turned up all the way, and I was hitting 30 FPS on the low end, and about 45 FPS average. When cranked down all the way, the game never dropped below 60 FPS (average: around 100 FPS), even with close to a hundred units on screen. There is no reason why any reasonably powerful computer built in the past two years can't run this game. If you drop a thousand bucks on a computer (which is on the low end) right now, it should be able to handle this game easily. Ensemble did a fantastic job optimizing the game, and it really shows. For those trying to play it on a 1.6 GHZ P4 with 256 MB RAM and GeForce 4 MX, please stop complaining and upgrade. Clearly those who can't get this to run efficiently know zip about computers, and are expecting way too much from their aging or budget rig.

The multiplayer...ah yes, the crown jewel, as they say. The multiplayer is absolutely brilliant, even trumping Age of Mythology's amazing online battles. The strategies, the intracies...all of it is enough to make the game playable for months on end. The game is extremely well balanced; no matter what people on various web forums may say, each civilization can effectively hold its own in any match, provided the player is up to the task. The introduction of the Home City and a deck of cards ensures that no two battles will be the same, and that players must adjust on the fly to the situation at hand. Getting rushed by a hoarde of Russian Strelets (light infantry)? Call out the free 3 Hussar (cavalry) card and mow 'em down. Desperately need villagers? Click on the 5 free villager card, and watch your economy soar. If your opponent's deck looks like a "boom" deck, then use your early cards to rush him and destroy him before he can advance through the ages. It's a thinking man's game, and you must be smart to win online in Age of Empires III. Employing one strategy will not be enough to get you by; only playing one civ will not cut it either. You must adjust constantly, and ESO is ever-tweaking the online experience with patches that affect various units, ensuring that no cheap players try to abuse certain advantages too much. And to all those saying that you cannot have formations, they are there. Simply turn them on in the options menu. These are essential for playing online, offerring your troops the ability to stagger their ranks (to avoid getting reamed by cannon fire), or to engage in melee mode (effective against fighting a cavalry onslaught).

Simply put, Age of Empires III has the most dynamic multiplayer I have ever seen in an online game. It requires you to think on the fly, to "run 'n gun" so to speak, and it all adds up to a frenetic and tense pace, even after you've played over 400 games. If you lose, you have no one to blame but yourself; your fate (to use a cliche) is entirely in your own hands. It's absolutely brilliant, and I am so enthralled and addicted to its multiplayer that I keep coming back for hours a day, more than 8 months after the game has been released.

You will not find a better strategy game than Age of Empires III, period. Those looking for a fast paced, tactical RTS should look no further. Those who enjoy a good chess match should stick to Civilization IV, and those who like a mixture of tactical and real time action should check out Rise of Nations. But for pure strategy, pacing, and production values, then look no further than Age of Empires III. It has refined the RTS genre to near-perfection, and I, for one, am left wondering but one thing -- how the hell can Ensemble ever top this? I've been left wondering that question before, and they've always delivered, so I suppose that, in the meantime, I will continue to indulge myself in one of the best games in recent memory.

2 Stars if you play multiplayer games online

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: October 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I played AOE2 non-stop for several years. This is yet another video game (PC or console) where playability was sacrificed for detailed graphics. Sure, it's cool to be able to zoom in and see your villager cutting down trees with his saw. But it's not cool when that comes at the expense of game playing and your computer resources. My opinion is that mass market games like AOE should not require users with relatively new computers to go buy additional graphic cards. I wonder how many thousands of copies of this are sold to people that can never use the program.

I long for the day when a gaming company releases a great game for a computer that was bought at least 2 years ago.

Here are my pros and cons as a long time AOE2 user.
Pros:
1. I like the home city concept very much. Not only is it historically accurate but it gives you another way to manage resources when you're stuck waiting and waiting for villagers to harvest their farms and chop wood. The long waiting at the start of these type of games gets old.
2. Certain fighting units are limited such as ships. This is a great advance because it forces your opponent to think strategically.

Cons:
1. Graphics come at the expense of playability. Particularly when you play online games start to get very very slow - even with DSL.
2. Graphics all look alike. In AOE2 you could easily and clearly see different between town center, market, barracks, stable, university, etc. etc. In AOE3 all the buildings look alike and have the same color. I literally have to slow down and sometimes drag my mouse over a building to see what it is. That stinks.
3. Gameplay is slower. Many commands take just a microsecond slower than previous versions. For example, when you click a building and then right click a gathering point. In previous versions, this was done instantaneously. Now, there is a slight lag. (My computer and graphic card are brand-new). In these type of games, you have to be able to react instantly. You can't wait at all or you're dead.

Also, if you play online there are many many bugs to be worked out. People drop out of games unexpectedly. Games don't launch. The game server drops. It's a major pain.

It's unfortunate but this game is a step sideways for AOE. It's been such a long wait for the new version and is more than a bit disappointing.

Warning: Do not install

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 16
Date: November 14, 2005
Author: Amazon User

If you are still determined to purchase this game after reading all the reviews here - do yourself a favor and search the tech forums first. There are a lot of questions and not many answers.

Some people think this game requires 64 bit capable processors - others note the long list of unsupported video cards, but many have serious problems. Patch 1.01 was only for the german version, and didn't fix any bugs.

This game seemed to work fine on my computer (AMD64 X2, 2 gig, unsupported ATI vid card), but it made the entire computer run 4x slower. After about a week of gameplay I got the dreaded sound problem (for no reason) and finally decided to remove the game. After uninstall failed to re-gain the previous speed of this relativley new computer, I re-formatted and re-installed the entire machine. I have friends that have done the same after noticing the same decrease in performance.

As others have stated here - the new "features" are not worth risking your comptuer's health.

For some....great technical problems (i.e., BUGS!@#!)

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 23
Date: October 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

WARNING: Bug-ware alert

After paying my $50 for this game, I loaded the three CDs required, rebooted my computer, expecting to play all night long.

Much to my surprise, I'd launch the icon to start the game, and it would give me an error and exit as it got to the main menu - each and every time. I made 12 attempts, still nothing. My computer is a 2005-model HP Pavillion with fast Pentium 4 and 1 GB RAM. Definitely should be able to handle this game.

Being resourceful, I found the technical support site. I wasn't too shocked to find a significant number of people who also had this problem too. And the publisher does NOT have any answers for them -- certainly not when or if it will be fixed. (They already have your money, and aren't giving it back.) I'm still awaiting my answer too! And I'm still out my $50, plus tax and shipping.

WARNING: Buy at your own peril. You won't get a refund. These people need to be held accountable.

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