Empires: Dawn of the Modern World PC Review Coeur D Alene ID

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Introduction

Recently the idea of empire creation in computer games has strayed from the turn base genre, over to the real-time strategy genre. Some of the most impressive titles that have aided this development to date are Empire Earth and Rise of Nations, two very competent games in their own right. However, no RTS has so far achieved a totally convincing empire experience, often shifting from age to age feels rushed, with little detail in between. This could all change with the release of Activision's latest RTS, Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. With 7 unique nations and 1000 years of war at the helm, Activision promise gamers the chance of virtual world domination, but can it really satisfy the Emperor in all of us?

Gameplay 85/100

Like most RTS titles, the game modes provided in Empires: Dawn of the Modern World consistMultiplayer, single player skirmish and campaign. There is also an included game editor, which allows you to create campaigns and scenarios. I am also pleased to note that the game allows you to play these custom campaigns on demand, so I would expect a reasonably large amount of custom made addons available for download off the Internet in due time.

The Multiplayer and CPU vs Player modes are alike, it is basically your run of the mill skirmish style of gameplay. Choose a map, starting and ending age, population limit etc, and you're ready to fight.

Campaign mode, on the other hand, is reasonably different to the common campaign mode. Instead of the "Risk" style campaign mode seen in Rise of Nations, where your battles and alliances are represented on a large world map, we see a linear style 'story' mode, similar to how an RPG story mode would operate. I really don't consider this style of gameplay to be 'campaign', as that word generally entails dynamic control over your battles, what we see here is definitely more of a story mode.

Upon choosing campaign, you will be given the ability to select from three different campaigns - Richard Lionheart of theMedieval age, Admiral Yi of the Imperial age and General Patton of the WWII age. These campaigns do not cover every age included, there is still the Gun Powder age and the WWI age, however these campaigns are very detailed indeed. So detailed in fact, you'll think you're playing a totally new game for every age you cover. With the amount of variation for units, buildings, technology etc for each age, the gameplay becomes better and better as you progress throughout the game, unlike other Empire style games, where new ages felt like graphical addons rather than real ingame improvements. If you play the medieval age, then the WWII age, the difference is quite remarkable.

As far as the actual in game gameplay goes, Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is a tad mixed. To start, the fundamental aspects are sound, I can't really pin point any aspect I totally dislike, the A.I seems reasonably solid, the pace also seems to be on key, everything just feels about right. As you delve deeper into the game, however, you will notice the general lack of depth forunits, buildings, research etc, particularly in campaign mode, and although each age does have good variation of these aspects as mentioned before, the actual amount of depth is not terribly impressive. This is not entirely bad though, as the campaign mode relies more on specialized missions and story events rather than generic "build a base and kill this guy".

Another small gripe I had was the cut scenes - a lot of the time, key story events were determined in cut scenes, which means you had nothing to do but watch. I'll be the first to admit that the story in this game rocks for every campaign, so the cut scenes were enjoyable,however I really think they should have cut down a bit on the amount and their influence. It is a little odd when a key battle is fought completely out ofyour control.