5 – Codename: Panzers
Do you want to know what engraved Codename: Panzers into my memory? Each unit with a different gun had different firing sounds. Yup, that was the level at which the game was back then. If your soldier had a rifle, it would sound like a rifle. If they had a machine gun, it would make machine gun noises. Submachine gun as well. Looking back at it, 20 years later, I can see how younger me was easy to impress, but you need to realize that this was during the World War 2 craze, where every game was set in the Second World War, and everyone was watching Band of Brothers, and playing Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. Panzers also had impressive stuff for the time, like armour values, ammunition supply, long-range firefights, and off-map skills you could use like air recon and strikes and artillery. It was a great game and if you don’t mind some outdated designs (units fight in line, basically), it’s still worth a playthrough.
4 – Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds
Until a couple of years ago, my experience with Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds had been limited to playing it on a demo disc in the late 90s when I was a very small kid who didn’t even know how to speak English. However, the game stayed with me ever since, and not because it was a particularly great game, and even if it was, small wee me couldn’t grasp how good it was, but because it was a very cool interpretation of other games I was playing, like Red Alert 2 and Age of Empires. Well, fast forward a couple of years and I found myself getting the game on Steam for pennies on the dollar and its campaign can still be as entertaining 20 years later, as it was back then.
3 – Empires: Dawn of the Modern World
The last three entries of this list should say a lot about what kind of RTS I was having the most fun playing in the early 2000s. The third entry belongs to Empires: Dawn of a Modern World, a game that’s basically a spiritual success to Empire Earth, and it was made by the same studio, using the same engine, so you can already imagine that’s pretty much Empire Earth, but slightly improved: a classical RTS with base building and resource gathering, and you’ll evolve across the ages, but instead of covering the entirety of human history, like Empire Earth, the team decided to limit things and set the game in-between the Middle Ages and World War 2. Doing this, allowed them to give each of the nations more personality and have each one of them play very differently from one another. Empires: Dawn of the Modern World never lived up to the height of Empire Earth, but it’s still a worthy spin-off kind of game to try and play around with if you’re a lover of any of the Empire Earth titles.
2 – Rise of Nations
The early 2000s were truly a golden age for RTS, and the genre was getting game after game. If you wanted to stand out from the crowd, you needed to do something different, so enter Microsoft Game Studios’ Rise of Nations, one of 2003’s best-reviewed games, and one of the best-reviewed RTS games of all time. Rise of Nations is a game that takes cues from all the popular strategy games of its time, like Empire Earth, Civilization and Age of Empires, as you advance through the ages, each nation has its own well-defined borders (I think the game even had attrition), and you could make absolutely massive armies of hundreds of units. The graphics were also incredibly good for the time.
1 – Empire Earth
Empire Earth is firmly planted amongst my top 3 most played RTS from my childhood, alongside Red Alert 2 and Age of Empires. It was basically the latter 2 put together, but in 3D, with more of everything, be it nations, units, gameplay options, you named it. It might feel weird to say this, but at the time, Empire Earth felt like the ultimate evolution of RTS. You could take a nation from the Stone Age all the way to the distant future, and seeing your decisions materialized throughout thousands of years of human evolution was really cool. In one Saturday afternoon, you could start a game and be fighting each other with stones and sticks, and by 10PM you would be fighting in the First World War, and the next morning mechs would be stomping around the battlefield, laying waste to everything in sight. So many good memories from this one, and if I could ask for just one remaster in my lifetime, Empire Earth would be it.
I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane and found some games you might have missed when you were younger. Or maybe you’re a young lad yourself looking to see what we, dinosaurs, used to play before smartphones and games as a service were a thing. If you have any hidden gem you would like to tell me about, please comment or email me at strategyandwargaming@gmail.com and I’ll add it to the list with your name on it!
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