Vehicles and Maps

The vehicles, too, give host to complete different styles of play. There are 10 different vehicles in total, each as important as the next. The majority are varieties of tanks, ranging from the Light Tank to the Heavy Tank – the former being the cheapest, the latter being the most destructive. With huge firepower and the ability to crush enemy infantry underneath their tracks, tanks are beasts. The APC is equally as useful, acting as a mobile spawn point for your team and providing additional firepower. The Jeep can cart your team around the map at lightning speed, which is extremely helpful in dire situations. Finally, the Command Vehicle, easily the most important vehicle, nay, the most important unit on your team is where the Commander sits watching his minions. If this is destroyed, it’s Game Over for your team.

With 15 official maps and over 30 if you count all the custom maps, there is tons to see. There are three types of game modes – Classic Mode is the standard RTS ‘take the whole map and destroy the enemy’ style of game – Command and Conquer players will know exactly what to expect from this. Conquest mode sees each team with no Commander and therefore no building – it’s straight-out team on team capture the flag style gameplay, much like Day of Defeat. The final less-used game type is Mission Mode, where teams are given different goals such as infiltrating the enemy base and escaping from a confined space.

On a whole, Empires’ gameplay is a wonder to behold. Playing on a team of people you don’t know forces you to talk to them and work together, while playing with friends can be a lot of fun. Groups of people can form together into ‘squads’ named Alpha, Beta, Charlie etc and these squads can receive special ‘Aura Power’ by hanging around their Squad Leader, depending on what class they are. Being part of a squad will also help you to level up quickly, as you receive rank points as your fellow squad members gain points. Squads can be up to 5 players and it’s definitely always worth finding a squad of players you can play well alongside.

Evil Empire

So mostly everything is hunky-dory, but a couple of things just sometimes don’t seem right. One problem is the number of players. In a server of 20+ players, Empires moves along swiftly and beautifully and the gameplay is wonderful – however, drop below this number and it can all suddenly become very slow-moving and a little boring at times. That feeling of full-on war, rushing into battle surrounded by allies on all sides is lost and the landscape begins to feel very sparse.

The Conquest Mode is also just not right. It is the FPS/RTS crossover that makes this game so damn interesting, so to take that out and turn the whole Mod into a DOD imitation just doesn’t work very well. This is maybe a little harsh – it does work and can sometimes be fun to play, be compared to Classic Mode, it just isn’t that fun.

You may have also noticed that we have mentioned Command and Conquer quite a few times during this review. That’s because the RTS element of Empires isn’t much different from our old friend and steals many of its ingredients. However, this can’t really be seen as much as a bad thing since basically every RTS style game ever out since C&C has copied it in some way, so we’ll just let Empires off with a warning.

Graphics

Thus the gameplay is largely top notch, but through all this brilliance, it’s quite hard to miss those graphics. To quote a fellow Steamfriend, “it looks like Counter Strike 1.6” and for certain parts, this is very true – in places, Empires isn’t much to look at. But elsewhere we find that a little more work has gone into the visuals – character models aren’t so bad and vehicles look pretty nice. Overall, however, our eyes fall onto graphics which belong in the 90’s.

Will these graphics kill the mod? This reviewer thinks not and the reason is simple – Empires is free. If you want first-class visuals in your games, go pay for them – if you want outstanding gameplay for FREE, you can’t do wrong with Empires.

Tick Tick Boom Repeat

Sound-wise you’ll find your standard gunfire samples with Half-Life 2 sound-bites mixed in for good measure. There’s also a nice array of voice commands, both male and female, giving the Commander the ability to boom his voice across the battlefield – ‘Destroy this Point!’ and ‘Move Here!’. The male voices sometimes sound a little like Arnold Schwarzenegger, which did make us giggle.

When it came to the sound, this is the element which could have been used to make the personality of the characters shine through. Much in the same way as Team Fortress 2, the Empires team could have given each character an accent, their own special way of communicating and, with this, their own personalities. Alas, this didn’t come to the team and so each character just feels a little generic.

Not So Empire

The general layout of the game is probably the element which needs the most work. Menus look a little scrappy as if they were made just as a test and then never changed. The voice command menu is found by pressing F and then commands are chosen by pressing W, A, S, D or Space… which takes you to another menu from which you choose another option… which can then take to you yet another menu. Empires would have worked equally as well just copying the old ZXC Source game menus and this would have been much easier to access.

Also, to access menus like the Vehicle menu, or the Select Class menu, etc etc, involving pressing lots of different buttons all over the keyboard. Now while this isn’t a great bother, it would have been just as easy to have maybe one button which brought up a ‘master menu’, which led to every available option. Simple is always better.