I'm gonna be honest here.
I found Battle Isle 3 to be a very confusing game, and I'm not talking about the story here.
Its the gameplay I'm talking about.
In the other Battle Isle games, I have no problem getting used to how you play it, but in Battle Isle 3 I am quite confused at what is going on.
And there is also another thing I find a little annoying about Battle Isle 3, mainly the FMV cutscenes.
It is painfully obivious that they were originally done in another language, as the lip-synching is quite terrible at times.
And I got these cutscenes where a tribes woman talks to the main character and it is really obivious that they had a male voice actor do the voice, as it sounds too deep for a woman.
Otherwise Battle Isle 3 has some pretty interesting ideas and great music, especially the Shadow of the Empire song made by the band called "Still Patient?".
What do you think?

I still think that 3 was the best Battle Isle, but I haven't for about a decade now. And I really like complex games.
As for the cut scenes, they were also badly lip synced in the original german version I played, so no idea what happened there. I always thought it was filmed in English to save money (in the 90s it was somehow cheaper for some german firms to film commercials in the UK and dub them) and were then badly dubbed to german. But the story should be ignored, did that even back in the day.

I liked Battle Isle 3 very much, but it was not the Improvment I hoped for. Actually I still think, the second Part was the best in the series. The cutscenes was one reason for that. Never seen people act so poor like the ones in this game. Everyone can see, that this actors are no professionals.

I have been playing BI2 again (which was BI 2200 before? I still have my old disc). I haven't played BI 3 --yet-- but I definitely remember a bug at the end where you couldn't finish the game. I hope they've fixed it.

Basically, the last mission had some obstacle in front of the final capture that could NOT be destroyed. I had to look it up on the Internet. The only workaround was to use a cheat code to pass through the object. I have no idea if this has been fixed now, but I sure hope so because after BI2 and Titan's Legacy, I'm diving right back into BI3. =D

You're not alone. BI3 was a big letdown for me at the time, and I always found that BI2 was the peak of the serie.

The interface was really messy and not immersive, unlike the console from BI2 where you could really imagine you were the general in the bunker giving order on his strategic high-tech "command suitcase" (a bit like in Supreme Commander 1).
The FMV were plainly bad, horrible acting.
I had no sympathy for the main character, disliked even more the idea of going against my BI2 avatar, and in fact I wanted Caro to lose.

BI3 is definitely, from my PoV at least, the black sheep of the serie.

Well,

I have always been a huge fan of Battle Isle 3. But I did not really care about the hilarious cutscenes (Caro :D). Anyway, I do not see why the interface should be confusing, it was not really that different from BI 2.

And I finished the game at least twice, so I do not know about some game breaking bug, but I bought it a few years after the it came out.

BI3 is an artifact of its time. It was one of the very first games designed to be run under Windows 95 (though it technically supported Windows 3.11 as well). Towards the end of the DOS gaming era, developers had been pretty good about making games with decent UIs - as demonstrated by BI2.

With the shift to Win95 gaming, developers seemed to feel the need to start incorporating aspects of the Windows desktop UI into their games. So you got a lot of mouse-driven UIs, with more windows than necessary and so on.

It was also made towards the end of the period where everybody was trying to cram FMV into their games (think Mad Dog McRee, Rebel Assault and Wing Commander 3). Little companies like Blue Byte didn't really have the budgets to do justice to FMV, so you get some absolute horrors - like the BI3 cutscenes.

I like it as a game. It has some well designed missions and I like the shift away from the "experience points" system from BI2 towards carrying over veteran units directly from one mission to the next. As I work through the campaign, I find myself getting attached to some of my units, like my Pythons and Polar cruiser. The difficulty curve is much steeper than BI2 - it gets much harder much faster - but it's still a fun game.

I personally think that Battle Isle 3 was bit too dark compared to rest of the series. It wasn't boring but it was depressing title in the series. You could compare it to Doom 3. It was really neat looking, it was dark and interesting, but didn't really evolve anything and it was just the same thing repackaged and had more stuff to do. I didn't like some of the unit changes but that didn't prevent me from playing the game. Technically Battle Isle 3 is Windows 3.11 native because it uses Windows 3.11 APIs such as WinG which aren't fully supported by Windows 95. That resulted some compatibility issues if my memory serves me correctly. Not to mention how sluggish the video playback was on Windows 95 compared to Windows 3.11. Battle Isle 3 also started as a Windows compatible add-on for Battle Isle 2. It wasn't meant to be full featured title but its development got out of hands and became what it is.

Windows 95 marks the start of Direct X era, and Battle Isle 3 is not a Direct X game. Its however true that Windows 95 did not launch with Direct X and that it instead came with WinG as its graphics API by default. Windows 95 was buggy and rushed out imho.

I was very disappointed those times about BI3.
It was really annoying to click so many time just to make an unit move or attack while it was just two clicks in BI2. If I had gotten one penny for each click I had so much money that I spent it in a BI 5 title with the restriction to use the old BI2 engine, and just create a new campaign with a good storyline like in good BI2. :)