Description:

Peter Molyneux may be able to hit the headlines with claims he’ll make a game allowing you to relive the life of a single person. But some games offer the daunting prospect of reliving and reshaping the entire course of human civilisation! In 2001 Sierra released Empire Earth, a bit like Civilisation but with real time strategy instead, from a team headed up by Rick Goodman, design lead on Age of Empires. The game spanned an impressive half a million years, from when man was grubbing about in the dirt with sticks and stones to a futuristic world a good few centuries more advanced than even our enlightened and sophisticated times.

Now Sierra are bringing us an encore with Empire Earth II, published by Vivendi Universal. Narrowing all of human history down this time to the most interesting 12,000 years or so, development in the game is broken down to 15 distinctive and historically accepted epochs, starting off in the Stone Age, when man built his first permanent settlements, and began to develop agriculture, stonework and of course weapons. It is this last most regrettable of mankind’s creations that forms the basis for the game’s progression. Although diplomacy is an option, the object of this real time strategy title is world domination, and the story told is the story of how a few sharpened chips of flint become by turns a sword, a rifle, a warship, an atomic bomb, and, as the game plunges eagerly into an imagined future, as yet uninvented weapons made possible by new technologies: computers, genetics, robots.

What this all offers the strategy gamer, is near unrivalled scope with more than 500 unique units and buildings. You choose the directions in which your civilisation’s research is made. The innovative War Planning system and ‘Picture-in-Picture’ real time control make the tactical side of things positively compelling. Amazingly detailed battlefields change according to the seasons and a weather engine adds an extra dimension to warfare, especially in the early stages. Once you’ve mastered the single player game you can take on rival civilisations online or over LAN, with an impressive array of nine different competitive and co-operative game modes to choose from. Crush them!

Information:

• Number of players: 1
• Development Company: Mad Doc
• Software House: Sierra
• Video Dimensions: 3D
• Publisher: Vivendi
• Point Of View: Third-person, floating camera