Empire Earth 2 Gold Edition

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This was on sale for $4 and I think its worth about that much. While it does have interesting ideas to evolve the core of Empire Earth gameplay, it's riddled with a lot of bloat and poor execution. Call it one step forward, two steps back game design. I only played a couple of hours in skirmish and felt rather bored. A lot of factors went into this, but the first one worth mentioning is the UI. The UI in Empire Earth 2 feels very cluttered and requires far too much navigation for a real time strategy game. Making two different menus for the buildings is a bad start, and making non intuitive icons for the building type makes it even worse. Overall, the menu takes up too much of the screen and has too many submenus. It definitely could have used some trimming. The music is another sticking point for me. While the music in EE1 greatly added to and enhanced the experience, the music in EE2 primarily feels like a nuisance. The percussion tracks are competent but lack emotive force without melody. You'd be best off replacing the music in EE2 with the music in EE1, but that still wouldn't save it. Lastly, what is a game review without talking about gameplay? I'm gonna make this short and sloppy because I've been trying to type this for an hour: -The way epoch changes are done now is better, but still kind of a mess because of what the tech tree adds (stat increases, but no new capabilities) -They really gave up on the genetic and synthetic age. It's really under ambitious and not as fun as the digital/nano and space ages of EE1. Those screamed FUTURE. These just seems like ten then twenty years into the future. Like, the tanks don't even have lasers! Lame. -No robotic farms. It ain't the future without automated farming. -Too many resources. EE1 was already pushing it but adding two more just really put it over the top. -Everything feels weirdly cramped? So just stick to EE1.

This is very worth for 2$, lot of fun

Don't get this review totally wrong. EE2 is not a terrible game. But it far inferior to EE1. - It has less than half the units EE1 had! - It has NONE of the era specific leaders such as "Henry V" or "Otto Von Bismark", it now has just a paltry three, generic souless leaders, whose "powers" are pathetic! - The first two epochs are a total balls up. Who the hell in their development team thought that Greek Hoplite Heavy Infantry and Stone Thrower seige engines are appropriate to THE STONE AGE? These units should not even appear for another five millenia!!!!! - What is the point of this new "weather system"? Apart from slowing units down a little, the whole thing seems a cosmetic, unecessary addition! Ships can still sail, and aircraft can still fly even in FKING HURRICANES!!!!! - Speaking of "weather", GONE, TOTALLY GONE are the "Prophets" who could call down firestorms, earthquakes, plagues etc! - What is the point of this much vaunted new "War Plan" feature? So far, AFAIK it DOES NOTHING, NOTHING AT ALL. You're meant to be able to influence an ally AI's strategy with this, but they JUST IGNORE IT, even when they say "hey nice strategy, we'll do that!" - Technologies and unit upgrades are a PATHETIC JOKE compared to EE1! Now you only have generic "veteran" and "elite" upgrades to units for example. In fact the only real improvements are the slightly better GFX, the new "territories" system which does add a new strategic angle to the game, and fact that buildings such as fortresses now are proper defensive structures, and not just glorified mothballed unit storage like in EE1! Houses now increase max population too, not just "defense" of an area. Ie, a few things have been made more like Age of Empires. Those few improvements are swamped by the deluge of terrible new ideas, badly implemented design and even the removal of many of EE1's strong features! (Actually EE2 *IS* shit, isn't it?) If this is the next step toward EE3, no wonder EE3 was TOTA