Battle Isle 2220: Shadow of the Emperor

aka: Battle Isle 3: L'ombre de l'Empereur, Battle Isle 3: Schatten des Imperators, Battle Isle 3: Shadow of the Emperor
Moby ID: 1873

[ All ] [ Windows ] [ Windows 16-bit ]

Critic Reviews add missing review

Average score: 83% (based on 11 ratings)

Player Reviews

Average score: 2.6 out of 5 (based on 9 ratings with 1 reviews)

How to ruin a pretty good series

The Good
It was possible not only to gain experience for units in one map, but to keep that experience, giving the player an advantage in the next level. The time the computer needed to make his turn was greatly sped up compared to BI2, as his moves weren't shown in detail - only a summary was displayed after he finished his turn.

The Bad
The developers wanted to improve the gameplay of the predecessor, and in doing so, they ruined it. BI 2 could be played with the keyboard alone, the interface was easy to learn. A mouse interface could have been even simpler, if they'd looked at the Panzer General Series - instead, they made it terribly complicated, with lots of annoying doubleclicks. Instead of the drawn / rendered cutscenes of BI2, now they used real actors - in the loosest sense of the word. The maps were repetitive, as well as the mission objectives - "destroy enemy / take enemy HQ" most of the time. For several times you had to play the same maps again and again, with only little changes! To name the forces of the AI "superior" would be an understatement. It always had plenty of units, factories and ressources. When you finally managed to push back the enemy, it was a long, hard road to victory, killing one unit after another in an endless carnage.

The Bottom Line
The interface was clumsy, the music boring, the graphics roughly the same as in BI 2. The quality of the movies was rather bad, the gameplay repetitive.

Windows · by Hadanite Marasek (27) · 2002

Contributors to this Entry

Critic reviews added by Patrick Bregger, Wizo, Alaedrain, Sun King, Tim Janssen, Mr Creosote, Dae, Parf, Scaryfun.