A Review: Age Of Empires, PC 1997

An RTS game from the late 90's and one that would go on to spawn a very successful and long-running series of games that is still going strong today. Gameplay is simple, allowing the player to lead one of a variety of nations through four technological ages, gaining access to new weapons, buildings, and units as play progresses. There are several game modes and a string of different campaigns with a mix of tasks and overall goals for the player to complete. One of the charms of this game is that it isn't too hard on newbies and can be learned and played without lengthy tutorials or guides being needed.

The game uses the Genie Engine, a 2D sprite-based game engine that was used quite commonly for RTS titles of the time. Originally touted as Civilization meets Warcraft, some found that this game failed to live up to those expectations when released.

While I was not 'blown away' by this game, I will admit that it was still pretty good. Though I did find some issues that bothered me and some that hurt the score that I chose to give out. The first major problem for me was that the campaigns were heavily restrictive in some cases. I also didn't like the missions that had the player starting with a fixed number of units and no ability to build bases. It was frustrating, starting again and again after being caught with my pants down by the computer opponent. I also thought that some missions were just copied and pasted from a previous faction's mission list, and that came across as lazy in my mind. There were problems with scripting too, I felt, and sometimes the computer had a plain unfair advantage with both build times and pre-existing unit counts. I did like the mechanics and gameplay overall, but it was hellishly frustrating at times, and that dampened my experience. I liked the tech tree and felt that the various units and buildings made sense while fitting in from a gameplay perspective too. The battles were easy to orchestrate, and when victory's came, they felt deserved and legitimate. I liked the amount of choice when it came to units, and I also liked that each nation had its own unique unit type. The game was fairly well balanced with regards to keeping your people alive and supplied with resources. Though I didn't like that there was a unit cap, I believe that this held the game back in some respects. It bothered me that you couldn't field huge army's and instead had to be very particular in your unit choice. Always leaving enough space open to build an army when needed proved to be frustrating, in my opinion. More than once, I screwed up in this regard and found myself running out of spare population to build an adequate force. I really did like the building mechanics, though; it was great to be able to build anywhere and everywhere. Many RTS games that I have played up until this one restricted the players building locations. I loved that I could set up a tower somewhere and then sneak in a single villager to build it. I felt that this ability opened up the tactics that could be employed nicely. Otherwise, I can complain little about this game. I did enjoy my playthrough quite a lot and found that this is one of those games that was best played here and there.

While not the best that was available at the time, I still felt that this game looked pretty good. I liked the isometric viewpoint and thought that the game engine did a good job of staying stable, especially on the more heavily populated maps. I never found that maintaining performance was a problem at all during my playthrough. The buildings and units fit very well with their technological ages, and I loved the little animations. The explosions were nice and, while not massive or grandiose, were good enough to let the player know that the desired something had actually gone boom. The environments were nicely coloured, and the various biomes were blended very well. I liked the animals and other resources and thought that their animations and sprites were very good, especially their harvested ones. I also liked the non-player structures and buildings that were added to some of the maps as strategic locations. I thought that they looked very nice and were clear in their designs.

Overall, I liked this game, but felt that the frustration and heavily repetitive nature of missions held the score back for me.


6/10 – good Fun!
 

Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ