America

By Jim Frazer

Jim's Comments: Age of Empires 1.5? Imagine what Age of Empires would have been like if they tacked on a new age called "The Western Age", and you will have America. The graphics are practically identical and the sounds used are the very same that are used in Age of Empires. The game play will also be familiar to anyone who has played AoE. You have your typical three resources; food, wood, and gold. You use these resources to construct buildings, to purchase unit upgrades, and to train units. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you enjoyed AoE, but it doesn’t make for a very unique game. America would have been better advertised as an Age of Empires total conversion mod.

Not that America doesn’t have some unique features of its own. There is a very nice system that allows you to convert resources from one type to another. Instead of your classic trading post style where you click on a building and say "Give me 30 gold for 50 food", you go to a cattle ranch and "raise" the cattle. They stand around in the fields, doing whatever it is that cows do until they get fat enough for you to take them to the butcher shop to sell for gold. It’s a nice little twist on an old concept. There are also banks that can be built that will give you interest on the gold that is stored in them. But what would a wild west style game be without bank robbers? Each faction gets a variation of the bandit unit that can break into your opponent’s banks and steal the gold stored in them. In my limited experience, the bandits made the banks much more trouble than they were worth.

There are four different "races"; Outlaws, Mexicans, U.S. Military, and Indians er, I mean, Native Americans. Each of these different factions have a six mission campaign except for the Native Americans which have 8 missions. After playing through the first few missions of each faction, it appears they are your typical RTS mission types. They range from the classic "kill everything that moves" to the more puzzle oriented "Get the caravan from point A to point B". Nothing too exciting, but it’s nice to that there is some variety in the missions.

We don’t need no stinking political correctness

Data Becker, the creator of America, is a German based company. This fact in painfully obvious as you listen to the mission briefings and learn what the units do. If this game was created by a North American company, it never would have made it past the public relations department.

Just think of the most typical stereotypes of each of the factions in America and you will no doubt find them in great quantities. The Mexicans all sound like a couple of mice from a 1960s Speedy Gonzolez cartoon. I kept expecting my units to suddenly run off, grab some cheese from the fridge, and drop an anvil on my cat. And of course most of the units are portrayed as either lazy or drunk; the construction units all sound like they’re upset that you woke them up, and the Gunmen, one of the most common units I purchased, can only be recruited from a Cantina.

It only gets worse from there. The Native Americans came right out of an old John Wayne film, complete with halting English and war chants. Their choice of unit names for the Native Americans could have been a lot better also. The only unit that can work the fields and put up teepees is called "Woman". Now I’m not a paragon of political correctness, but even I was a little offended that the only things a woman can do in the game is work in the fields or clean the house.

You’ll notice that I first introduced the Native Americans as "Indians". This term apparently was frowned upon by the public relations department of Data Becker’s North American publisher, but not until after the voiceovers were done. All of the text in the game refers to this faction as "Native Americans", but at every point in the text that reads "Native American", the narrator says "Indian".

Speaking of narration (pun not intended), this game has plenty of it, and it’s all bad. From the Mexican narrator that sounds like a bad Cheech and Chong impression to the Native American narrator who must’ve been out of breath since he can’t say more than 2 words in a row without pausing for a full second. After the first couple of missions, I had to turn my speakers off and just read the text.

Technically speaking…

Being apparently based on the Age of Empires engine, the in game graphics are exactly what you would expect. The units all look pretty good in 800 x 600, but are a little too small when I played in 1024 x 768. With the look of AoE also came the stability, which is spectacular. Not a single crash, lockup, or frame rate loss in my roughly 12 hours of gameplay.

The cinematics leave a lot of be desired though. It looked to me as if they were designed to run on a 14 inch monitor and were just expanded to fill the screen of my 19 incher. I could actually count the number of pixels represented on the screen. Since the resolution on movies is preset, I couldn’t adjust them to attempt to clear up the picture. This is a real shame since the action depicted looked to be exciting.

Summary

America is a very safe "me too" style AoE clone with some stunning stereotypes thrown in. The novelty of the Wild West environment lasts roughly two missions for each faction. Using the Wild West motif allowed for some interesting new building ideas that will hopefully show up in future RTS titles, but it isn’t enough to shake the feeling that you’ve played this game before.

 

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