It's immediatly apparent that Age of Empires III is a massive graphical advancement over it's older siblings, and well it might be given the amount of time between the games to be honest. It is however a better looking game than many other modern RTS offerings, to be perfectly honest it looks great. Lot's of bleeding edge shader effects are employed to good effect, water glistens in the sun, shadows look great though occasionally shaky. Animation is also impressive, it's great fun to watch artillery bowl over a group of troops, especially if they are your enemies, they just fly about in such a great looking and amusing way.