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.
