Age of Empires IV

The venerable real-time strategy series is back. A year ago, after a sixteen-year gap, Microsoft released Age of Empires IV, the latest in one of the most beloved strategy series of all time. It has a very strong heritage to live up to, so the question is if it has succeeded, especially with new franchise developers Relic coming on board. Relic have a solid pedigree, but their last game was the very underwhelming Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III, so a lot was riding on this game for them as well.

The answer to whether this game is a success is, "kind of." The first surprise is that, despite the name, Age of Empires IV is not a sequel. Up to this point the series has always proceeded linearly forwards in time: the original game covered the empires of antiquity, so Rome, Egypt etc, and the second covered the medieval period, whilst the third game took us into the Age of Sail and colonisation. You might be forgiven for thinking Age of Empires IV would take us forwards into the Napoleonic era. Instead, Age of Empires IV is a remake of Age of Empires II. Once again we're in the Middle Ages, and once again we're fighting the Battle of Hastings, guiding the Mongols across Eurasia and fighting the Hundred Years' War between England and France.

Age of Empires IV is perfectly adequate at doing that. As with prior games in the series, you usually start with a town centre and a bunch of villagers whom you can set to work on building up resources: food, wood, stone and gold. You then expand your settlement by adding blacksmiths, universities, markets, barrackers, archery ranges and so on, as well as watchtowers and walls. Age of Empires IV tweaks the formula, mainly by adding a secondary research facility known as the Arsenal and moving some upgrades around between buildings, but it does not significantly rework it. There are some features like now being able to station your units atop walls rather than just behind them, but mostly it's low key changes.

The 3D engine is nice but not a huge advancement on the 3D engines of Age of Empires III and the now-twenty-year-old spin-off, Age of Mythology. The graphics are in fact a tad disappointing for a 2021 release, especially since they are so inexplicably resource-hungry. My PC (16 GB RAM, 12 GB graphics card) which can handle Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man with everything turned up to max (albeit only in HD), chugged regularly with the considerably more visually underwhelming Age of Empires IV. Also, not much is done with the 3D engine. You can zoom in and out a bit and spin the camera a bit and that's it. This isn't Total War or even the much more versatile 3D camera of Relic's own Company of Heroes series.

More baffling, given the modern graphics and physics at work, is a lack of features from older games. In earlier games in the series you got a damage bonus from being on higher ground, but that disappears in this game and both attack and defence bonuses are missing, meaning units on walls with cover are just as vulnerable as if they are standing exposed in a field, which is a bold choice for both a modern game and also for the developers who made RTS cover such a huge feature of their Dawn of War and Company of Heroes series. There's also no ballistic or physic tracking of arrows: arrows will automatically hit their target (even blatantly swerving in mid-air to hit them like a smart missile) even if the target is moving at speed, which is baffling. In earlier games keeping your army active and smartly moving was a key tactical skill, here it is entirely absent.

Balancing against that is somewhat greater factional differences. Earlier games were notorious for having very samey sides, with maybe one or two unique units and maybe a single unique building or upgrade. Age of Empires IV does go a bit more into making the sides different, with French cavalry being much more hard-hitting than anybody else's, whilst the English have superior longbows. Most interesting are the Mongols, who can pack up their entire base and move it around the map in a matter of seconds which can give rise to unorthodox strategies (a Mongol wonder that can heal all the units around it becomes a mobile field hospital). I do feel this is has been a tad exaggerated. The factions are still mostly very similar, certainly a long way from the balanced-but-asymmetric design of, say, the StarCraft games or even Relic's own Company of Heroes series.

Age of Empires IV does impress with its amount of content: the game ships with four complete campaigns (Normandy, Muscovy, France and the Mongols), eight civilisations, a robust single-player challenge mode, skirmish maps and of course multiplayer. Focusing on just the single-player content, I got about 40 hours out of the game, which is reasonable and a long way from those RTS games which ship with one campaign lasting maybe a quarter of that. Presentation is also excellent, especially the FMV movies which accompany the campaigns with lots of video footage of the actual locations, with CG imposed on top of the real topography to depict the battles. There's also bonus videos on things like how to make a bow and how different tactics developed. There's a nice history documentary feel to the game which is unique and intriguing.

Less appealing are the bugs: as well as the choppy performance, the game's autosaves are disruptive to gameplay. Units will often go into idle mode for no apparent reason: villagers in particular may need to be manually told to do something two or three times before they actually do it. You can't tell a villager to build a wall halfway across the map and expect them to do it, you have to manually watch over them to make sure they don't do 25% of the task and then just doze off (literally, as idle villagers now go to sleep standing up), which is infuriating. Individual missions also have a plethora of bugs, with triggers often not triggering, enemy units not showing up when they're supposed to, or taking some weird path that leaves 50 men wedged behind a bush. It's also concerning that many of these bugs remain extant in the game almost a year after release. There's also the lack of basic QOL features, like being able to easily assign WASD to camera controls.

Taken on its own merits, Age of Empires IV is perfectly fine (bugs excepted). It's safe, but the gameplay loop remains compelling and there's some interesting strategies to tease out. However, the game has to deal with a 500-ton elephant in the room called Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition. This ultra-HD remake of Age of Empires II only came out three years ago and has seen three expansions released since then, the most recent only in April. Age of Empires II has less bugs, more responsive and easily customisable controls, a stronger interface, more focused gameplay and, although only being in isometric 2D, has sharper, more vivid and far better-performing graphics. It is also a more interesting tactic experience, with ranged weapons performing better from hills and tougher stone buildings (those in IV tend to collapse far too easily to just guys with swords and torches, even massive fortresses).

Age of Empires IV (***½) is solid, and will no doubt be expanded with interesting future content. But it's also a game that arrives being almost pre-redundant, since Age of Empires II Definitive Edition does almost everything that IV does in the same time period, but better, with less bugs and a far vaster amount of content, and will take you a lot longer to play through. The game is available now on PC.

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Wertzone Classics: Age of Empires II Definitive Edition

Remasters have become a good way for a publisher to make a fast buck. Take an old game, do the bare minimum of work necessary to get it working on modern hardware, throw in some old expansions and away you go. Back in 2013, Microsoft did that with Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, releasing a "HD Edition" which was serviceable but no more. Unhappy with the remake, Forgotten Empires Studios got permission from Microsoft to continue developing new content for the game in the form of new expansions and updates. Three expansions later, Microsoft gave Forgotten Empires the green light to undertake a much more comprehensive remake of the original game.

The result is Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, one of the most comprehensive and impressive remakes of a video game ever released. The game fully retains the original look and feel, but the graphics have been sharpened up to a hugely impressive degree. An intuitive UI has been implemented, allowing for villagers to re-seed farms automatically (rather than waiting for you to tell them to do it) and for units to undertake queued-up tasks. AI has been sharpened up, with a more impressive, reactive enemy on campaigns and in skirmish games.

At the core, though, the game is the same as before. Like the original Age of Empires, the sequel takes you through a period of history, this time starting after the fall of Rome and extending to the Renaissance. In this thousand-year period, you take control of a civilisation and guide it to victory. This can be done in skirmish, multiplayer or various story-driven campaigns. Those used to the intricate storytelling and even characterisation of RTS campaigns in games like StarCraft II or Homeworld will find these campaigns to be somewhat stand-offish, with less focus on hero units and more of a focus on how to achieve objectives corresponding to historical events. However, there is a linking narrator between each mission of each campaign, which adds some nice historical flavour.

On each map you start with a Town Centre and can build villagers, who are your basic resource-gathering units. Resources are divided between four types: food, wood, gold and stone. As with the original game, a nice twist is that resources can be gained from multiple sources: for food you can send villagers hunting, you can search the map for herd animals to send back to base for slaughter, you can find berry bushes, you can build farms or you can send out fishing boats. Gold can be found in mines or gained by trading with an allied power. However, an immediate, monumental improvement over the original game is that you can now build a Market which can exchange one type of resource for another. Relying too much on this can be problematic (a resource's value drops the more you sell it, and another's increases the more you buy it), but it immediately solves the problem of losing a battle because you've run out of resources, which was frustrating in the original game.

The other big chance from Age of Empires is the addition of formations. Your military units will now automatically organise themselves in blocks with heavy infantry in front, archers behind and cavalry at the rear (ready to sweep out and flank the enemy). This a vast improvement on the original game, where units just hurled themselves into battle randomly in a disorganised fashion. It's still a long way from Total War - and units have an odd tendency to drop out of formation the second combat starts - but it's a big improvement for the franchise.

The gameplay loop of a slow buildup followed by huge amounts of carnage is extremely compelling, and arguably better-handled then any other game of its type. A lot of this is down to the robust way the game has of handling defence, allowing you build fortified walls to seal off areas of the map, forcing enemies into chokepoints and otherwise controlling the battlefield. Constructing the perfect defensive fortification with guard towers, cannon emplacements, fortresses and defensive artillery positioned just right is an unmatched pleasure. With the more comprehensive new UI (allowing you to queue villager construction phases) and better AI, meaning both enemy and allied players are less likely to get stuck on scenery or take weird routes to their destinations, the game's controls are now smooth and easy to parse, and it is almost gleefully fun to watch your cities and defensive redoubts take shape before your eyes. And, of course, immensely frustrating if the enemy AI or a rival player gets the upper hand and burns your achievements to the ground.

Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition may also redefine the meaning of the phrase "generous content." The package contains:

• All of the campaigns in the original Age of Empires II: Age of Kings release from 1999, including five campaigns totalling 31 missions. Between singleplayer and multiplayer, thirteen distinct civilisations are available to play.
• All of the campaigns in the original Age of Empires II: The Conquerors expansion, including three campaigns totalling 18 missions. Five new civilisations are added.
• All of the campaigns in the expansions to Age of Empires II: HD Edition. These total three expansions (The Forgotten, The African Kingdoms and Rise of the Rajas) containing thirteen campaigns and 66 (!) missions. Thirteen new civilisations are added.
• Definitive Edition also contains its own expansion, The Last Khans, and a new campaign for the Forgotten expansion. The new material constitutes four campaigns and 21 missions, as well as adding four new civilisations.
• The game also has a "Historical Battles" campaign with one-off missions from a variety of campaigns. There are 16 missions in this mode, including some for civilisations which don't have a full campaign. 
• For those keeping score, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition thus ships with 27 campaigns totalling 152 missions, and 35 civilisations.
• However! Since release, the creators have released two new expansions: Lords of the West and Dawn of the Dukes. These expansions have added a further six campaigns, 33 missions and four new civilisations. So with the expansions, the game now totals 33 campaigns, 185 missions and 39 civilisations.

For this review I decided to complete every single-player campaign mission in the game, which took a massive 231 hours. I also sampled the multiplayer and skirmish modes, and some of the co-op campaign features. Let there be no doubt that Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition offers more bang for your buck then any other real-time strategy game ever released. It's a monumental package that will keep you playing for months.

It's hard to really think of any negatives here. Most maps have several times as much gold than stone, which feels strange and probably a result of balance issues, where building a line of castles bristling with archers right into the enemy base was a viable tactic in the original release. The many newer maps having less stone makes this less viable and increasing the production cost of castles would have been a controversial alternative choice, but it still seems odd. There's also the old problem of the "aggro areas" around units feeling not particularly generous, sometimes leaving units being slaughtered whilst the rest of your huge army stands idly by a few feet away, not getting involved. Improve AI has made that less of an issue than it was in the original game, though.

Those extremely minor niggles aside, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition (*****) now stands as a towering achievement for the traditional real-time strategy game. It's well-judged quality of life improvements elevate it past the mildly disappointing StarCraft Remastered of four years ago to become the definitive 2D RTS game. It is available now on PC via Steam and PC GamePass.

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition

The dawn of civilisation. Stone Age hunter-gatherers give way to Bronze Age farmers and Iron Age warriors. Across the world tribes are rising to greatness, founding villages that will become the first great cities and then the centres of vast empires.

Age of Empires, released in 1997, was a late addition to the real-time strategy genre, following on the heels of WarCraft (1994) and Command and Conquer (1995) and released almost simultaneously with Total Annihilation (1997). Whilst the other games in the nascent genre were fantasy or science fiction in genre, Age of Empires drew on history for its inspiration, and was particularly inspired by the historical, turn-based Civilization series.

Age of Empires is, at heart, an RTS as usual. You start off with a base - in this case a town centre - and can build worker units from the base. These gather resources, which can be used to construct further buildings, which in turn producer military units (archers, infantry, cavalry and ships) you can then take into battle. So far, so standard.

Age of Empires does do a few things differently, though. There's a huge amount of emphasis placed on support buildings which offer upgrades: send your 20 non-upgraded infantry guys into battle and they're likely to get slaughtered, but carefully choose from a selection of weapons and armour upgrades (you're rarely so flush with resources that you can upgrade everything) and they can turn into tanks capable of absorbing twice as much damage and dealing out more.

Resources are divided into several types: food is plentiful (effectively infinite, once you've researched upgraded farms) and wood is usually commonplace, but gold and stone can be much harder to track down and will require aggressive early exploration of the map and the securing and defending of resource points. Once you have a steady stream of resources, you have to protect them (sometimes a difficult task if you end up with half a dozen resourcing operations going on in remote parts of the map) and you also have to strike a balance between gathering resources and going on the offensive: the campaigns have a tight default limit of 50 units between both resource-gatherers and military forces, and it's not uncommon to have so many workers doing stuff that you realise you can't sustain an army of more than 10 or 15 guys. Go the other direction and you may end up with a nice, big army, but not enough resources coming in to replace losses in the field at a sufficient clip. There are some ways of increasing the population gap to sidestep this problem, though. One nice touch is that you can sometimes get the same resource from different sources: food can be acquired by any mixture of farms, hunters, berry-pickers and fishing boats.

The game is also notable for its slow pace versus its competitors: units take ages to build, and making your way through the tech and research tree can be slow going. The first two campaigns in the game do a good job of indulging this pace, but then the next few throw that out in the window and encourage a much more aggressive playstyle, which can be jarring. You can overcome the slow building issue by building more unit production centres (so construct four barracks rather than one), but this obviously stretches your resources even further.

Age of Empires does a lot right. The more complex resource management and pared-back military operations make this a somewhat more thoughtful game than its contemporaries, but also one where levelling up satisfyingly and getting a good loop of resource-gathering and then military deployment going can be tricky. The game is more challenging on this level than, say, Red Alert or WarCraft II, which both encourage and reward a far more speedy and aggressive commitment to warfare and much more simplistic resource management. There's also a nice historical intro and debriefing after each mission, setting events in a genuine historical context.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems. The Definitive Edition of the game, despite remastering the game's graphics beautifully, does not fix some of the old problems and introduces new one. Pathfinding is excruciating, perhaps the worst of all the classic RTS games, with armies in particular taking absurd routes to get to their destinations. There's little to no ability to control formations, so your slower, heavier tanks will simply fall behind your speedier skirmishers rather than staying in front of them to soak up damage. It does feel like almost every building takes twice as long to produce units as it really should, making for slow going at the start of each map.

There's also a plethora of bugs in the game. The most annoying is one that the game will sometimes "merge" a number of units standing near one another into some horrible mutant gestalt, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. The gestalt may break apart into its constituent members at some point, or stand there (presumably screaming in existential terror) until you put it out of its misery. Needless to say, it is incredibly irksome if half of your army decides to fold into a gibbering mass of limbs just before you launch your final assault on the enemy stronghold.

Another bug is related to difficulty. For some reason, the game defaults to the hardest difficulty on several missions rather than using the difficulty you've actually selected. This makes for unpredictable difficulty spikes where the game becomes so challenging it's borderline unplayable at times (and Age of Empires comes from that time period when "Hard" in games meant "actually really hard"), not helped by the pathfinding and units-merging issues.

The bugs, unfortunately, are prominent enough that they make playing and enjoying the game today much more challenging than it should be. When the bugs aren't happening and the player can get on with the game, there is enjoyment to be had. Unfortunately, this becomes more infrequent the deeper into the game you proceed.

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition (**½) is a beautiful-looking game and there's some fun to be had here (especially in the earlier campaigns), but a number of annoying bugs gradually escalate to make playing the game much more of a chore than it should be. The refusal to improve either the game's pathfinding or the sometimes-dunderheaded AI may have made a game that's true to its roots, but also one that's definitively been made obsolete by other games, most obviously the Definitive Edition of its own immediate sequel, Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, as well as the splendidly-updated Age of Mythology. Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is available for PC now.