It's been five years since Ensemble last visited the Age of Empires series. While some may consider Age of Mythology an unofficial sequel, I think fans of both the genre and the series were anxious for it to get back to its roots in history. Age of Empires III provides a glimpse of the ages of discovery, imperialism and industry that laid the groundwork for what we know as North America today. And in high strategy fashion, Ensemble tries to give us something more than the map at hand by introducing the Home City, a feature that deftly incorporates the nature of colonizing the New World. I prepared myself for grand adventures.

My first experience with Age of Empires III was with the single player campaign, where I was put in control of a hero character and a small fighting force, and asked to defend a pre-existing colony. These first few missions were clearly designed to ease a new player into the game's core mechanics, but seasoned RTS gamers and players of Ensemble's previous games will find their environment immediately familiar. What wasn't so familiar, though, were the floating numbers above each slain adversary or destroyed enemy building. These were experience points, which are even gained for simply keeping your fledgling colony running. Experience points are put towards getting shipments from, and increasing the level of, your Home City.

The main campaign is separated into three acts that span the Age of Discovery, the Age of Imperialism and the Age of Industry as it follows the exploits of a family bloodline through each act's main hero. Unfortunately, the underlying story behind the campaign mode is a ridiculous fiction surrounding the battle for the Fountain of Youth. The cartoonish stereotypes for the hero characters are equally out of place - a concept that seems taken directly from Age of Mythology. It just doesn't work in a game that is supposed to be capturing a period of our history. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to even call it a "campaign", as it plays more like a "story mode" that makes only passing references to the act of colonizing the New World and establishing an empire.

The first Act puts the player in charge of the Knights of St. John, a faction made up of the remnants of the Crusade, and they are at an immediate disadvantage technology-wise. Both the Ottoman and Spanish empires that must be faced during this first Act have numerous weapons that use gunpowder, and make short work of most melee units. The strategy then becomes a race to the Fortress age, upon which the biggest army possible is built and then sent to destroy the opposing force's Town Hall. It's that simple, and except for the last battle that forces players to wage war on land and on sea while trying to destroy the island holding the Fountain of Youth, most of the missions follow a predictable formula and pose little challenge to the average RTS gamer. Even the missions that are timed, a tactic that only the laziest level designers use to create a challenge, are fairly straightforward once you secure a steady influx of resources. The remaining two acts - the Age of Imperialism and Age of Industry, respectively - only serve to reinforce the predictable nature of the first act's missions, and do little to play off of the political settings of their time periods and instead focus on the frivolous pursuit of some mythological artifact.

The rock-paper-scissors formula for combat is present as always: pikemen are good against cavalry, cavalry good against infantry and ranged attackers are best left to defend from the back ranks. Artillery is good against buildings, but is vulnerable to infantry attack. The technology tree for each age also seems extremely limited for a game that covers such a varied period of history, and there is very little variation between each playable civilization - they each only have one or two unique units, and provide no definitive strategic benefit. Even the hero characters for each civilization aren't given their own portrait artwork in the game.

Until I changed some settings in the options menu, I wasn't able to create unit formations by default. Worst of all, your army will move only as fast as the slowest unit, making cavalry excruciatingly slow when escorting artillery. Unit pathfinding and AI behaviour are also frustrating - constant monitoring is required so that your troops don't wander off and take on a guard tower or platoon of cavalry.

I haven't seen an interface this big since Force Commander, but thankfully it can be reduced. The units are instantly recognizable, though the buildings and environments are subtly detailed and evoke a real sense of the time period. As such, the visuals are at once commonplace and awe-inspiring. Though I think what really makes the entire engine work is its implementation of physics. The use of physics in an RTS is not something you usually judge its quality by - in the past simply seeing a building erupt into a fireball was indication enough it had been destroyed. In Age of Empires III, you will actually see pieces of a building fly off of the structure and splinter into a few fragments, the almost tangible smoke billowing into the air. The smoke, flames and fragments of wood are especially prominent during warfare at sea - the amount of detail that has gone into illustrating the action of this game is really incredible.

I thought it was a great idea to allow factions to ally with local natives on each map as another way to improve your army, as well as gain experience through trade. However it seemed a bit odd that all it took was building a trading post inside their village to gain their respect and undying loyalty. There is no upkeep required to keep your Native friends happy, and aside from the capital cost of building trading posts there is no need to think about your new allies until you prepare for the next skirmish. Furthermore, only the trading post itself can be destroyed - which will cut off trade and your supply of fresh native troops - but not any of the surrounding village. It seems a bit unbelievable that the population of the native village remains intact, along with their positive opinion of you, no matter how many different players take up trade with them during the course of a game.

If I might also point out the way the game handles, or rather opts not to handle a sensitive period of American history: slavery. I think it should be extremely obvious to anyone that plantations and farms were not staffed by happy European peasants sporting muskets in the Imperialist U.S. Should the happiness of the workers have some effect on your colony's production? Perhaps this is adding an unneeded level of complexity, but I found this evasion of historical events a little insulting. When examined closely, these types of compromises undermine the historical accuracy of the game, and strip out what made the series interesting in the first place.

When I first heard about the Home City, I expected to be given control of a massive repository holding my nation's technology, resources and political standing. The fact that Ensemble boasted the Home City would be like a "persistent" character in an RPG made me think that I'd be able to upgrade its attributes to improve my civilization's performance on each mission. In a way, this was true, because when your city gains enough experience, it will ascend a level and give you access to "cards" to put into a deck. These cards can be assembled into different decks for use during a game, and each civilization has access to a different set of cards. The cards themselves are used when you are able to send shipments across the sea to your colony, which are also obtained through experience points. It's a simple system, and shipments will give you almost instant access to resources like villagers, troops and materials that don't require any collecting of resources. You are also able to customize your city, but it's only cosmetic. There is no option to upgrade or construct new buildings that affect gameplay, which would have been a lot more interesting than unlocking a collection of cards.

The Home City system may be an attempt to represent the meta-concept of Europe's race to conquer the New World, but to me they amounted to little more than bonuses to what you already have access to. With the constant accrual of experience, shipments may be available more often than actually building the units, but it's not like you'll ever get to see special units available only through your Home City or gain the ability to build special buildings. Some cards can be sent infinite times while others can only be sent once, and some depend on the Age that you're currently in. This adds a certain amount of value to the system from a strategy perspective.

Still, these new features deliver no sense of scale and no sense of accomplishment for a subject as expansive as the discovery and settlement of the New World. The potential exists for so much more than a weak campaign and a skirmish mode that only requires you to beat your opponent into submission on a single map. 1503 A.D.: The New World captured the elements of expansion through trade and strengthening your nation's economy - not simply mining for resources and amassing an absurdly large army. Land acquisition was also extremely important during this time, and something like Rise of Nations' world map could have been used to create a goal for each civilization: be the first to control the resources of North and South America, with battles for territories fought on individual maps. Trade between your established colonies could then take place, fueling your empire so that it may take on the next territory.

There are pages of background information on the various European and Native cultures and their respective leaders, as well as a description of each unit that is available and its relation to gameplay available from the main menu of Age of Empires III. For a series that prides itself on historical accuracy, I find the game troubling in the way it disregards realism in favour of a more accessible and formulaic brand of gameplay.

I want to be able to fully recommend Age of Empires III, because as an RTS title it's actually pretty good if you're willing to ignore everything that's come before it. However, as with any new addition to a successful franchise, expectations have run high and are ultimately brought back to earth when the realization comes that the game was more of a showcase for RTS in three dimensions than one that tries to expand the stifling borders of the genre. In a time period where continent-wide exploration, trade, and conquest were the driving forces behind these expanding empires, it was shamelessly squandered on an exercise in brute force combat. I expected more from a studio like Ensemble, who has clearly become too comfortable with their success.