![]() On consideration, it’s mostly the former. The gameplay itself is still charming in a way, but I do have to wonder how much of this is just nostalgia from my decade-old memories of building a Castle next to the enemy town and spamming Petards to destroy their fortifications, and how much of it is actually to do with AoEII’s quality as compared to modern games. ![]() Even those differences that do exist seem like arbitrarily chosen advantages rather than anything resembling a single playstyle: what do the Saracens’ reduced market trade costs have to do with their increased galley attack speed? It's not unheard of in strategy games - Civilization uses a similar system - but it seems particularly clumsy here. It means that AoEII’s civilizations struggle a little bit to gain their own identities. ![]() This is in stark contrast to most modern RTS, which have a far smaller number of clearly distinct civilizations. All use the same kinds of units (with a couple of unique units thrown in), build the same buildings, research almost the same technologies, advance through the same ages and generally have very similar strategies. A handful of other victories are possible: you can use your Monks (notorious for yodelling and capturing enemy units and buildings) to capture all relics in the game, or build a Wonder (only available in the final age, and requiring inordinate amounts of resources and time) and keeping it standing for a set amount of time.Īge of Empires II has an enormous number of races to choose from – 18 in total – but these are all very similar. The core Skirmish gameplay is that of a base-building RTS: in short, you create villagers from your Town Centre, set them to gather resources and build structures, advance through the ages when you have gathered and built enough, and slowly build up an army to conquer the rest of the world. These lacklustre imitations of the skirmish mode are separated by some rather nice historical segments, usually narrated by some sort of foot soldier, and told through hand-drawn stills, but you are honestly better off watching them on the internet or using the “Black Death” cheat to get through the dreary, repetitious levels. Base building shows up later in the campaigns, but for some reason your technologies and progression are limited so that you are playing some sort of demo version of the game. Once you are actually in combat, AoEII doesn’t really have any strategy to speak of, so all you really do is right click on the enemies and watch what amounts to a brief cutscene. Most of them begin with a dreary escort quest where the main character and a couple of guards amble across a map and defeat any enemies they see. Unfortunately, the campaigns really aren’t very good. There are five campaigns in the original game, and four more added by the expansion, each of these dealing with a different civilization’s conflicts, from Joan of Arc’s war against Britain to Saladin’s victory in the crusades, and the Aztecs’ futile last stand against the Spanish Conquistadors. The Conquerors (included in the HD Edition), the game’s only expansion, extended the game west across the Atlantic, adding in some races from the Americas as well as some more colonial races. In case you missed out 14 years ago, Age of Empires II is set around the turn of the second millennium (that is, the year 1000AD), and specifically deals with the conflicts within Europe at the time, though also heading east for some Crusader action. So does Age of Empires II retain its crown? In short, no, it does not. ![]() But times change, and standards and genres change with them. Indeed, I put it behind only Warcraft III and AoEII’s half-sibling Age of Mythology on my list of the greatest RTS titles of all time. It is still to be found on many all-time top 50 game lists, including my own. When it was released back in 1999, Age of Empires II was one of the finest real-time strategy games ever made. By Arthur Kabrick, posted on 14 April 2013 / 8,074 Views
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