I thought it was alright, until i discovered Emperor. To me, the 3d graphics of Emperor are a lot better. I'm not much for my marines jumping four feet in the air before they die. And there are a lot of other things that don't make sense. But the gameplay is nice. You have to give kudo's for Microsoft actually creating a balanced game that spans so many epochs. But the odd thing is, if you save some swordsman, they become really powerful once their obsolete (uses them against some of the later epochs intending them to die, and they did surprisingly well) I think it was a good game. Just gets repetitive after a while, and you really can't play all the ages in one sitting (even though technically you can) because of inflation.