Age of Empires III is real time Strategy game, meaning that everyone is going at once. This is now the third Age of Empires game, the graphics are great. You get your pick from a few different Civilizations from around the beginning of Imperialistic age. Each civilization has a few of its own specialized units.

Age of Empires III has a campaign and unlike the other Age of Empires, I actually played it. The campaign is fun. It is broken up into 3 parts a race and fight to the fountain of youth, where you destroy it. The second part is an untold story (no historic facts) of a plot by the Russian Empire to invade and crush the American Revolution. The last part of the campaign is about Manifest Destiny and another plot to destroy America.

The thing I like about this Age of Empires game is there is interaction with the AIs in this game, but the AIs don’t respond as well as they did in Age of Empires II. The AIs make taunts and do insults towards you. They don’t always listen to you though; they ignore you or only listen to certain commands and not others.

The graphics in this game are amazing and much better than in the previous games. There is detail everywhere and you can build your own custom home city.

The new feature in this Age of Empires game is the home city. You get to do all kinds of customizations to it. The other thing important to remember about the home city is that during game play you can get supplies, troops and etc. from the home city.

For this game your population is can go as high as 200. On the downside to this, each unit can have a population count anywhere from 1 to 6. So armies aren’t as large as in Age of Empires II. On the bright side ships do not count towards your population anymore. It is now even easier to find out if your workers are idle. A clickable flag will appear in the left hand corner of the screen letting you know your worker is idle and it will take you straight to them.

One of the disappointments I have in this game is the scenario builder. You can build maps and play multiplayer on them as long as you’re not using AIs in your game. The AIs are only reactive when you build your scenarios. Meaning the AIs only react if you do something to them, so they don’t build, they don’t attack. All they do is react once they see you. If you want to build a custom map you have to do a lot of coding. There is no built in map builder in this game.

The next thing that bothers me about this game is the team settings. In all the other Age of Empires games you can set up teams. In this game however you only get two options. Either two teams or no teams, this is really annoying and disappointing.

So with how this game is with its up and downs I give this game 4 out of 5.