If there’s one thing that fuels up my nostalgia tank, it’s revisiting classical games from my childhood. One of earliest videogames, according to my totally accurate memory, was Empire Earth 1.
Empire Earth is an RTS game. Real-Time Strategy. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, it’s the same genre as games like Warcraft 1–3, Starcraft, and Age of Empires.
Empire Earth is admittedly an old game, having been released back in 2001. While this does result in some flaws in the game which I will get into, the game still holds up in terms of its aesthetic, mechanics, and innovative ideas.
Gameplay Mechanics
In a standard match of Empire Earth, you will take control of a newly formed civilization in the Prehistoric era. Confined to a limited sized map, you start out with 1 capitol building and 5 citizens. Your goal is to gather resources to build up your empire, expand your kingdom, advance through different eras of human history, and eliminate opponent civilizations, normally in the form of AI (although there are still ways to connect to online servers and play against other players to this day!).
The first thing you’ll notice when you load up a match is that there are five resources at your disposal — Food, Wood, Stone, Gold, & Iron, as well as a population capacity indicator. These resources can be found and gathered from all around the map, though you normally start out with some of everything pretty close to your spawn point.
Your next steps will be to produce more citizens, which you can further use to build other buildings (such as a barracks to produce fighting units, or towers to provide defence against other players). After reaching the potential of what you can do in the prehistoric age, you will be given the option to advance to the next era, at the cost of some resources.
Epoch advancement is, in my opinion, something which makes Empire Earth stand out from a lot of other RTS I’ve played. Other RTS games do use a similar mechanic to give the player access to more advanced units or buildings. Some, like age of empires, also disguise this as epoch advancement, although the number of epoches tends to be limited to a small number with significant changes to each.
In the Empire Earth base game, you advance through 14 different Epoches. From the prehistoric caveman, to the Stone Age, the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, the Dark Age, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Imperial age, the Industrial age, the Atomic World War I age, the Atomic World War II Age, the Atomic Modern Age, the Digital Age, and the Nano Age.
You get to advance from caveman to robotics , at a pace which lets you see the slow advancement of humanity as it builds up its arms. Many ages come with new aesthetics, new units, new buildings, and new upgrades.
You can also choose to lock the game into one epoch or to set a custom starting epoch or custom final epoch if you prefer to stay, for example, in the medieval era to do your final battle.
Graphics & Artstyle
In my opinion, the art in this game still holds up as very aesthetically pleasing and relevant. Sure, if you zoom in to a villagers face, you’ll see textures that may give you nightmares…but the game is played from a broadly zoomed out birds eye perspective. And it looks gorgeous from up there.
The game also automatically puts buildings into a ghost/ethereal texture which lets you see through them if they are covering something up. This allows players to easily tell what’s going on in the map.
All in all, you can clearly see that the developers put a lot of love into making this game.
Sound Quality
The in-game music in this game isn’t anything to write home about. The main menu music on the other hand gets stuck in my head from time to time, featuring catchy war-themed music.
Other than that, the sound effects and voice acting in this game are actually quite good. Each unit from each era has a strong sound associated with some memorable lines. The nature sounds and mining sounds are very crisp and satisfying to listen to.
Complexity
While it sounds like there’s a lot to learn in this game, it’s actually quite straightforward. While each epoch does give you access to new units and buildings, the units themselves are easy to use as the majority of them do not really have any abilities other than the basic right click to fight. Advancing for the most part just makes you stronger, and a lot of the main buildings remain the same for most of the different ages.
The game also has 4 different campaigns to play through, each one having a story that takes place in major different epoches which allows you to learn how to play in each of them.
It’s a game that you can easily pick up and get back to even after years of not playing (as I know firsthand).
Cons
Being an old game, I’ve experienced some issues with the coding and UX. Not many, mind you. The major issue I have with this game is the pathing choices of the units who do not always take the most efficient path and will require some guiding on your part.
In order to play online, you also need to download the game through a particular program which allows you to connect to a community-managed server.
Finally, on newer and bigger monitors, the game might seem way more zoomed in than it is intended to be — though this does have a workaround to get it back to how it’s supposed to be.
How To Play?
You can find this game available for purchase on the GOG website & desktop app for less than 7 EURO including all it’s DLC and updates (Gold Edition).
And for that price, it’s actually pretty worth it. I highly recommend this game, even if you’ve never played an RTS game before. It’s a great introduction to the genre, and each match you start can give you several hours of entertainment value to finish off.
Let me know if you enjoyed this article, and if you have played Empire Earth 1 (or any of its sequels) before!
If you would like me to cover some more classic games, leave a comment :)
