Hearing the incredibly long historical background for each level read aloud doesn’t suddenly make it interesting, and I doubt anyone will have the patience to play through all 10 of the tedious and nearly identical campaigns.Īnd some of the changes made seem to be actively working against the game. The campaigns are fully narrated but they’re still just regular singleplayer games with a depressing 50 unit population cap and one or two half-hearted objectives thrown in like “Destroy the sentry tower” or “build a sentry tower”. The units are beautiful but they’re still pretty much straight upgrades of each other, a far cry from the depth of AoE 3 or even the simple but satisfying Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanics of AoE 2.
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Plus there’s new sounds, new voice narration for campaigns, new music, full workshop support – it’s clear that this was intended to be a passion project, a far cry from the pointless StarCraft: Remastered whose mission statement seemed to be “Yeah, I bet we can make a few bucks off this.”īut these changes aren’t enough.
This is officially the best-looking Age of Empires game, and it looks especially good if you’ve got a 4K screen to display it on. In addition to the quality-of-life fixes, Forgotten Empires has redone every single sprite and texture in the game – and while AoE 2‘s HD Edition merely cleaned up the old sprites and made them higher-resolution, these are completely new models with new animations that still somehow feel like their bricky pixel counterparts. Here’s the thing: Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is in many ways a labor of love. Plus the pathfinding and AI are still surprisingly crap. But a lot of these fixes only serve to show how simple the gameplay is when stripped of most of its mechanical frustrations. To its credit, the Definitive Edition has added a lot of quality-of-life fixes, like an idle villager button (very important because your villagers rarely stick to a task for very long and it’s hard to tell when they’re working or not), the ability to queue multiple units in buildings, and Attack-Move. You could only build one unit from a building at a time, you had no good way to keep track of those units, and actually getting them to go where you wanted them was a Sisyphean exercise in futility. Most of the technical skill involved in playing the original Age of Empires came simply from fighting the unintuitiveness of the whole thing. If you wanted deep strategy you’d play Civilization. There’s loads of civilizations but the only differences between them are a couple of closed branches on the tech tree, and there’s really not much strategy beyond “age up faster” and “build walls.” Keep in mind that at the time it was literally advertised as being similar to SimCity – much of the appeal was simply the fact that you could build big cities in a world that felt detailed and historically-grounded.
It was an early entry in a still-burgeoning genre that was waiting for StarCraft to come out a year later, and even at the time it felt a bit…empty. Let me keep it simple: don’t buy this game.Īge of Empires is a historical real-time strategy game originally released in 1997 focusing loosely on the period of history lasting from the Stone Age to the beginnings of the Roman Empire.
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And while Forgotten Empires has done everything they can to polish this turd to a pristine shine, the game has also come saddled with a host of technical issues and the ever-infuriating quirks of Games For Windows 10. Like the first Saint’s Row it’s a game that kicked off a beloved and venerated series, but not one which is actually very good or fun to play. Which brings us, inevitably and unfortunately, to the first Age of Empires.
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In the not-so-distant past I’ve praised Microsoft’s efforts to revitalize the series, releasing definitive HD remasters of the games complete with oodles of new content courtesy of Forgotten Empires, a mod team turned official developer that truly does care about the series and is passionate about making each game the best possible version of itself. Nevertheless, Age of Empires is in my blood, and whenever I play a new entry in the series or replay an old one it feels like coming home. I was too young to really understand it, and according to my mother I mostly just liked to build houses and then get villagers trapped in those houses. The worst Age of Empires game gets the worst remaster.Īge of Empires is the first game I ever played.