Age of Empires III is not a proper sequel to AoEII, lets just make that clear at the start, even the developers admit that the game started development under a completly diffrent title and the AoE label was only forced on it by the publishers.

Overall, the gameplay is decent, the grapics are good and it's got a very nice single player campaing, the multiplayer is fun but is dragged down a bit due to the persistent city leveling system.

I'd say it's a good strategy game, it's not a good AoE game, but on it's own it is still decent.