Empire Earth 2: The Art of Supremacy

And, really, this is an expansion pack by numbers. Want more Empire Earth 2? Well, here it is. The clue was in the "Empire Earth 2" in the title. Expansion pack standards such as extra campaigns and more races are expected, and satisfied. The new races being the Russians, French, Massai and Zulu, all of which are spotlighted in the new new campaigns (with an added one with our old chums, the Egyptians). All campaigns are based on a similar model to the original game, with only the near-future Massai one raising eyebrows with the cringe-worthy "Fighting Lions as a rite-of-manhood" ritual opening task. As if they'll be enough lions left in the mid-21st century for people to go hunting them with machine-guns to satisfy lazy stereotypes. Oh - there's some historical missions too again.

Over in the Skirmish mode, there's a handful of interesting additions. Firstly, the idea of custom civilisations, which involves picking the requisite special abilities from a list, choosing specialist units, free techs and so on. Expect a lot of intensive min/maxing in the Empire Earth online community. There's also additional skirmish/multiplayer modes: Territory Hotspots and Tug-of-War. Territory Hotspots involves claiming and defending the eponymous territory hostpots and Tug-of-War is more worthy of discussion.

It's is an interesting attempt to deal with one of the standard comments about Empire Earth's design. In that while there's fifteen epochs to develop through, in the course of a single game it's extremely unlikely you'll do the Civ thing of climbing from cavemen in their birthday suits to near-future soldiers in their exoskeletons. What it does is link a series of skirmish games together into a larger campaign - or rather, a linear line, where you perform a tug-of-war. Actually, the mode's somewhat misnamed - it's about pushing them back, rather than dragging them nearer you. If you win, you push your opponent a step back along the line. Lose, take a step back. If one player ends at their end, they lose. What makes it deal with the problem is the degree of persistence between the maps. So if you research up to the fifth epoch, that's where you'll start the next.

It's a neat solution, and mostly works. The only problem being the intrinsic one with any continuing campaign where there's an element of persistence. If an opponent ends up a couple of epochs ahead at the end of a match, that's one hell of a thing to recover from. Similarly, the experienced troops of the last battle turning up again. Screw up, and that's the whole game screwed for you. Well... that's what a persistent campaign means, sweetie. If your mistakes didn't haunt you, it'd hardly be the same thing.