Age of Empires

The Good
The production values in Age of Empires (AOE) are simply outstanding. The graphics are quite luscious, and we're not just talking about the terrain tiles, units, and structures here. There are all kinds of brilliant little touches, from scrumptious-looking flora (palm trees, berry patches, etc.) to exotic fauna (deer, elephants, lions, crocodiles…even birds soaring overhead!).

The soundtrack is also splendid, with appropriately sweeping music and juicy sound effects (including the unit responses made popular by WarCraft II). I especially appreciated the sounding of the trumpets that alerts you to battle action occurring somewhere.

Equally impressive is the instruction manual, which not only does an adequate job of explaining the game, but is also full of historical background info on the civilizations that appear in the game. It takes me back to the glory days of MicroProse and its thick, beautifully-written and -illustrated manuals. Which makes sense, as AOE designer Bruce Shelley previously worked with Sid Meier on a few MPS classics, including the almighty-and-everlasting-king-of-them-all Civilization.

Finally, I have to admit that AOE includes a long list of features that I wanted to see in an RTS following the overwhelming success of Command & Conquer and WarCraft II. Most obvious is that the subject matter is human history, not the cheesy sci-fi/fantasy of the aforementioned games – a huge improvement in my book! There are a slew of playable civilizations instead of the then-standard two sides. There are campaigns, scenarios, and (best of all) random map and deathmatch options which generate a new playing field every time. I don't much like set scenarios and campaigns in real-time strategy games (historical wargames are another matter); I prefer the infinite variety of random maps. I'll admit right now, then, that I didn't play through all of the AOE campaigns. If I wanted to play a story, I'd get a Sierra or LucasArts adventure! Strategy games should let you make your own story, and AOE does just that.

Still, I give AOE kudos for having the scenarios/campaigns for those who want them, as well as what seems to be a quite robust editor. Same goes for the multiplayer options. I'm a solo player, so I have never used them, but they were a no-brainer to include given this type of game.

The Bad
Remarkably, once you get past all of the slick presentation and the impressive laundry list of features in AOE, you eventually discover that the actual gameplay isn't all that good.

Command and control issues are guaranteed to sink any real-time game. AOE has MAJOR issues. The unit pathfinding AI is absolutely appalling, regardless of the setting you select in the Game Options screen. As a result, the player feels more like a diaper-changing, hand-holding babysitter than a god or a general. Making matters worse, the pretty—but also pretty useless—isometric perspective can actually get in the way of selecting and moving your units.

The worker units are quick to abandon their tasks when attacked, but they don’t resume their work when the threat is over. They pretty much just stand in place, slack-jawed, presumably waiting for the Stone Age Godot. And heaven help you if your worthless workers should complete the task you assign to them, as they are usually too incompetent to take the intiative and find something productive to do with themselves.

You can build walls, but you can’t build gates. You actually have to manually delete a section of wall in order let your troops enter and leave your own compound. Give me a break!

The military units are generally cool, but they seem a bit unbalanced. The siege weapons seem especially overpowered, given their very high hit points/power/range. As a result, walls and towers aren’t as effective as you might think they should be. Granted, this is hardly ruins the game, but it does make AOE seem biased against the defensive player.

There are no build queues, which just heightens the game’s overly ADD-friendly, clickfest atmosphere (although AOE is admittedly deeper and slower than most RTS games before it). No unit formations, either. I don’t care if those weren’t considered standard features in RTS games at the time. They should have been standard all along.

Not a single one of the victory options feels truly satisfying. Pure conquest mode drags things out long past the point where you know you’ve won. Building a wonder certainly looks impressive, but it means you can pretty much play a whole game without much contact with outside civs—pretty boring, really. The artifact and ruins options almost seem like cheating. Maybe that’s why there is no High Score list or Hall of Fame. No need to preserve your achievements if they weren’t that big a deal in the first place.

Farms frequently "go fallow," which means you constantly have to rebuild them manually. This gets to be ridiculous. It doesn't add anything to the game but busywork, and it isn't even really in keeping with the "realism" found in the rest of the game. In Real Life, buildings rot and need repair over time, but AOE doesn't force you to fritter away your time rebuilding them!

You can build docks to trade with other civilizations for resources (well, gold, at least). This sounds like a good idea, but it is usually more trouble than it is worth. And sometimes the other civs don’t even build docks, which renders the whole trade issue moot!

There is a dearth of information. I find this especially disturbing given that this is allegedly a strategy game. How the heck am I supposed to plan and manage when I have almost no data to work with? How many houses have I built so far? Farms? Archers? Hoplites? Who knows?! Apparently I'm supposed to just "guesstimate" these details. Yuck.

Before playing AOE, I thought I liked Warcraft 2 in spite of its shallowness. After playing AOE, I think maybe I loved Warcraft 2 because of its shallowness. Or rather, because of its elegant simplicity. AOE’s designers seemed obsessed with piling on more stuff, to the general exclusion of making genuine improvements to the RTS genre (which has always needed a lot of improvement!). This isn’t a crime or anything, but it is disappointing.

The Bottom Line
I wanted very badly to love AOE. I respect and admire it, but do I love it? Well, no. I like it as a friend, nothing more. In short: a beautiful but flawed game, and something of a missed opportunity.

The Good
Age of Empires is the first game of the current mega-developer Ensemble Studios, and caused a massive amount of polemic in the real-time strategy community. On one hand, it was full of errors, bugs, and blatant design idiocy. This could probably be attributed to first-time blunders, but were enough to totally ruin the game for many people. But others were capable of looking beyond the game's problems and enjoying the game's good points, which are many. Age of Empires ended up becoming very influential and is often regarded as the one of the forefather of the "historical RTS" sub genre (Empire Earth, Cossacks and the Total War series to name a few). In various top-10 lists of most influential genre games around the web Age of Empires usually gets at least a grudging mention.

Whatever bad things you can say about the game, at least it has vision. Rather than being a Warcraft or Command & Conquer clone it depicts real history (10,000BC-2000BC). You take control of a tribe of cavemen and lead them from the stone age to the iron age shortly before the rise of the Roman Empire. It gives you a great sense of perspective to be hunting lions and mammoths at the start of the game and then later build a huge walled fort equipped with ballista-shooting towers on the same spot.

Gameplay is the typical empire-building affair popularised by Civilisation except it obviously isn't turn based. You build cities, harvest resources, and eventually fight against rival nations. It's a simple theme but works for the game. You have a huge assortment of cultures to choose from (Sumer, Greece, Egypt, Shang, etc.) which aren't noticeably different but have small culture bonuses that encourage you to play to that culture's strength (Egypt has better chariots, for example, and the Assyria has cheaper archers). While the game bases itself on history (Bible students will have a field day playing Age of Empires) it isn't anally retentive about it, and has no problems with shafting history for the sake of gameplay.

Units and buildings are just as all-encompassing as the civilisations that train them, with a huge selection of infantry, cavalry, archers and siege weaponry. Ensemble Studios came up with a great idea that preserves the flow of gameplay and avoids anachronisms, you advance your culture in "ages" which cost a lot of resources but give you access to more powerful units (you start in the stone age and can only build clubmen, but advance to the Tool Age and you can build axemen, bowmen, and scout riders, and so forth right up to all the cool stuff on the box which can be built in the iron age). It doesn't sound terribly spectacular on paper but it dramatically changes gameplay by forcing you to pay big in order to advance your culture. This isn't some empire-builder where you can just rush to the Iron Age, max out everything on a dime and then dominate the opposition. In some cases it pays to stay in the earlier ages longer and focus on building up your economy.

I'll keep focused here so this doesn't turn into one of those boring "nothing but a summary" reviews. What is the single greatest thing about Age of Empires that has caused people to love it despite its obvious faults? Content. This game is loaded with content. I'm not just talking about a diversity of cultures and unit types (although the game has a plethora of both), but of attention to detail that is found in every aspect of the game. Everything in the game was designed and placed with care. It might not succeed in all of its aspects but you could NEVER call Age of Empires a production-line game.

The game puts you in an immersive environment right from the start. You have rolling plains and grasslands filled with animals that can be hunted for food, seas that can be fished, forests that can be felled lumber (or alternatively, used as a natural barrier against enemies) and so forth. Age of Empires encourages you to make use of the terrain, soldiers fighting from an uphill advantage do considerably more damage than those on lower elevation. The difference here is marked next to contemporary RTS games. Maps in Warcraft II were grid-based boards with sprites on them and the game scarcely tried to conceal this fact. Maps in Age of Empires are actual landscapes, with every nook, cranny and hill a potential strategic chokepoint that can swing the game in your favour.

The game has a reasonably good single-player component, with story driven campaigns that let you play historical personages such as Hammurabi and Alexander the Great. Far more fun is the multiplayer "random map" mode, which is one of the coolest parts of the game and perhaps the only one to be implemented flawlessly. With a mouse-click you can generate an unlimited number of randomised maps to play on, each of which will be totally different thus ensuring no two games are the same. Age of Empires has easily the best random map generator of its time and this dramatically extends the game's replay value.

As opposed to most RTS games where your goal is to destroy everything, there's actually an attempt at sophistication here. You can build a "wonder" (which is a massive building costing a ton of resources that takes forever to build) that causes you to win the game if it stands for long enough, and you can likewise recover ancient relics scattered across the map to win the game (I'm not sure what the historical context for this is, but hey). Religion plays a part of your society, you can recruit priests who heal your injured soldiers and even convert enemies! Few things match the enjoyment of stealing your enemy's super-expensive war elephants with a priest. You can have treaties and alliances with other players, and even declare an armistice if you want. Ensemble Studios has tried to make a game where you can win through trading, diplomatic manipulation, and getting a monopoly on resources rather than simply killing everything in sight. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really exploit these concepts well and at the end of the day the winner is usually the guy with the biggest and best army. But at least they tried, and that puts it light years ahead of most brainless combat-oriented strategy games.

Age of Empires sports great production values, complete with lavishly-animated FMV (far better then anything Blizzard has yet given us), full voice-acting for all units in the game and all the bells and whistles of a triple-A Microsoft game. Your soldiers will answer you in the language of their homeland, a really cool touch. Another nice feature is how the user-interface changes to match the art style of the culture you're playing as. Graphically the game uses a 2D isometric engine, and so is rather dated next to games like the fully-3D Total Annihilation. But the game still manages to be graphically stunning due to laboriously detailed animation, a distinctive art style, and clever use of a limited palette (I didn't realise the game was only 256 colour until someone pointed it out to me.) The same applies to the game's use of audio, which is far from being a technological breakthrough (the soundtrack is midi) but nevertheless does its job of setting up atmosphere.

In terms of presentation, it also bears mention that the game comes with outstanding documentation. That may sound like a strange thing to be talking about but it annoys me when a game gets shipped in a $60 box of air consisting of a CD and a flimsy, four page instruction guide (or worse still, no paper documentation at all). Age of Empire's manual is a work of art in its own right, complete with extensive information (both gameplay and historical) on all of the civilisations and units, fully illustrated by professional artists, and with enough historical trivia to write a term paper. The game has a easy learning curve thanks to an in-built help system and this makes it a very "newbie friendly" game, unlike most contemporaries where you're dumped on your ass and left to figure out the mechanics of the game through trial and error.

The Bad
Here the autopsy begins. Ensemble Studios was a development house composed mostly of people who had no prior experience in the video game industry (classic example: lead designer Greg Street was a marine biologist prior to working for Microsoft) and it shows. Oh boy, does it show. You can tell that a lot of love and excitement was put into this game, it oozes from every electronic pore that here was a group of people passionate about making games. However they lacked experience to temper that enthusiasm and as a result you have the mixed bag that is Age of Empires. It's a cool game, but to enjoy it you must endure a lot of quirks, a lot of design-based problems, and a lot of ass-headed stupidity.

Age of Empires is so unbalanced it almost breaks the game. I mentioned earlier that each civ receives a set of unique bonuses, right? Well one civ, the Shang, gets a blatantly unfair bonus in the form of half-price villagers. In multiplayer, this means a Shang player will be able to afford way more villagers than a non-Shang player, and this gives them such a huge advantage you can walk in to any online gaming room you like and find everyone exclusively using Shang. What's the point of having 17 different civilisations when only one of them is competitive?

The amazingly skewed balance is found in all aspects of the game. Infantry is crap, archers and cavalry will mow them down effortlessly and they're too expensive anyway. Chariots cost virtually nothing and are waaaay overpowered, so as a result early battles are usually not-so-fun contests of "guess who can build the most chariots." In the late game siege weapons dominate, you can build whole armies of helepoli, catapults, nothing else and expect to win. And there's too big a gap between the Tool age and the Bronze age. If you get to the Bronze age ahead of your opponent you're pretty much guaranteed to win since you have access to all-powerful chariots and he doesn't.

The above may sound like petty geek whining but balance is one of the most important aspects of an RTS game. Strategic gameplay means being able to make choices. If you're shoehorned down one path while playing (due to unfair distribution of stats among units/civilisation) then it removes the entire element that makes the genre fun. You can't say you won because you outthought and outsmarted your opponent. You can only say you won because you executed a formula more effectively.

Over to more general problems, the game is micro-hell. Early in the game you have to rely on hunting game and picking berries to feed your people. Your villagers aren't too smart so you have to constantly check back on them to make sure they're still working and aren't standing around doing nothing. You'd think a 1997 game would be able to incorporate the minimal basics of AI. After these sources of food are exhausted you have to switch to farms, which need to be replanted every few minutes. By hand. That's right. Every few minutes you have to take your focus off the battles and make sure your people don't starve. It's quite strange, since most gameplay innovations found in new RTS games try to reduce the emphasis on this sort of mindless busywork.

The game slaps you with a population limit of 50. That sucks. You need at least 20-30 villagers to keep your civilisation's economy afloat and when you factor in the need for scouts and priests you don't have much room left over to build military units. The result is "epic" battles between six or seven warriors. BLECH.

Maybe they got confused somewhere and thought "AI" stands for "Artificial Idiocy". You remember classic examples in Warcraft II where you'd send your army down a completely clear path and half of them would inexplicably get stuck against trees or rocks? Yeah, it's even worse here. Incredibly bad path-finding means you have to baby-sit your soldiers every step of the way, making sure they don't get trapped against tiny obstacles or against each other. And of course there's to oh-so-fun instances of where an enemy sneaks a catapult up to the edge of your line of sight, blasts half your army to hell with one shot, and the remaining soldiers don't do anything. Weeeeeee...

Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if the game had a halfway decent user-interface or system of control. Unfortunately, they only give you the bare minimum of control over your men. Want your men to hold their ground and not go chasing after every stray scout that wanders into their line of sight? You can't. Want to instruct your men to patrol an area, or follow waypoints? The game doesn't let you. And if you're expecting modern conveniences like multiple production queues, formations, and customisable stances...think again. Think very hard again.

So we have an insanely micro-intensive game, compounded by a less-than-helpful interface, bad AI, an obtrusive unit limit that screams "ARTIFICIAL LIMITATION" like an air raid siren, and unbalanced gameplay mechanics, and you'd got one critically flawed game.

The Bottom Line
...And perhaps even an irredeemably flawed game. Do I recommend Age of Empires? It depends on whether you're the type of guy who skips through the songs he doesn't like while listening to a CD or the type of guy who sticks it out and listens to the whole thing. If you are capable of tolerating bad design you'll find a really good game, maybe even one that has the makings of a classic.

Or you could always get Age of Empires II, which contains all of Age of Empires' good points and none of the bad.

The Good
Age of Empires contains 36 missions divided to 4 campaigns. All of them has good historical description. Moreover, you can play on randomly generated map. You can set numbers of enemies, resources, civilisations (there are 12 civilisations to choose - each of them has different line-up of units and technologies) and more. There are various ways to win - you can destroy all your opponents, capture all artefacts, build a wonder and even more.

Obviously, you can't win without army - you can train axemen, horse archers and hoplites. Additionally, you can construct chariots and catapults. Your army can be upgraded by researching technologies. You should also build towers and walls to protect yourself from enemy's attacks. And believe me, computer player is hard to destroy and likes to attack you frequently.

Naturally, there is multiplayer. Even today you can find somebody to play it using TCP/IP or Internet. Graphically the game looks good, despite being only a 2D game.

The Bad
Unfortunately, controlling your army is difficult. There are no formations, and your soldiers can spread out or lose their way in narrow places.

In AoE also appears frequently very annoying situation - you have to destroy every unit of your enemy to win, so if there's single enemy unit and it's on the other side of map, you have to find it and destroy it. You can spend a lot of time searching of this unit...

Your units lack of proportions - for example, your stables are as big as your catapults, and your little transport ship can carry 5 elephants bigger than ship itself. There are 4 sets of buildings instead for 12 civilisations - Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian and Asiatic. So, Phoenicians use Greek tileset, despite the fact that they were unrelated to Greeks in any way, and Sumerians use Egyptian tileset. Moreover, units' appearance doesn't differ in the game, so you can train Greek hoplites when you are playing as Japanese.

Game uses a CD audio music or MIDI music, but watch out - some re-releases don't contain CD audio music, and MIDI music isn't good enough to listen to.

The Bottom Line
If you like RTS games, you should play it - it's one of most influential games in the history, and it's very entertaining, despite few flaws. Just download a patch, disable music and set the highest resolution. You can still download a trial version, which contains 6 missions unavailable in full version.

The Good
Age of Empires got me hooked on real-time strategy games. It was Ensemble Studios' first game; they put a lot of hard work into making it just right, and they succeeded brilliantly. The graphics are breathtaking and the units are plentiful and unique. Resources are balanced; sometimes hard to come by, but never impossible.

The campaigns are perfect! I didn't like the sequel's campaigns much at all, unfortunatly; I still play these sometimes. The cutscenes in between them are stunning, comparable with Blizzard's work IMO, and the stories are captivating. But the maps for them are perfect! They are challenging but balanced, with resources in key spots and enemies in just the right places to make it hard just when you thought it was gonna be easy. You'll really need to use your head to win them, unlike some other, very simple RTSs. Ground troops, flankers, bowmen, seige weapons and war boats all have their places, and they are all neccessary at some time or another.

The Bad
Stone is just about impossible to come by if you squander it early on. They fixed this in Age of Kings, by the way.

There is also a bug with the AI-- if you have two priests trying to convert a unit at the same time, it can't decide which one to attack and will just freeze. So under the right conditions, the game gets dangerously easy. On a larger scale, this could have pretty much ruined the playability of the game, but it's only an annoyance as it is ('cause the enemies normally come by with buddies who chop your priest into mincemeat when he gets near enough to convert). Also fixed in the sequel.

The Bottom Line
If you're wondering which RTS to get, get Age of Kings. It's better than this one in almost every way. But if you're either collecting good RTSs, or just good games, or want to see where Age of Kings got its brilliance from, look here.

The Good
This game is addictive as hell. Nice historical premise. Lots of units. Great tech tree system. The net play is really good over Microsoft's MSN Zone. Matching up is easy. Smooth fluid graphics all the way through with detailed units and character animations.

The Bad
The AI should have been worked on longer. I don't know how many times I lost a group of men to a ravenous bunch of trees. Obviously, the pathfinding is horrible. Also, a really didn't like the scale of thing. It gets a little annoying seeing villagers tower over houses. Also, a lot of idiots on the net who host games say that the game has cheats disabled, then you find out they were lying when two minutes into the game you are being attacked by sportscars. Oh, well.

The Bottom Line
One of the better historical RTS games that could have been a classic ( a la its sequel) if the developers had put a little more thought into some things.

The Good
Nice graphics, good sound, a lot of depth, campaign and scenario editors.

The Bad
Bad path-finding, you can still "tank rush".

The Bottom Line
I don't know how this game got bad ratings here [MobyGames], but they arn't close to accurate. This game is way better the Warcraft2, Red Alert etc. It has great depth, lot's of units and campaigns, and it's just plain fun. Get it, it's a deal at $19 now.

The Good
This game was very, much a Civilization with improved graphics. I was really, surprised at the time that Microsoft coould put out a game like this. A very, good game with excellent graphics and sound for the time.

The Bad
The peasants were pretty stupid, and path finding for the AI was always a problem.

The Bottom Line
Advance from a stone age tribe to a classical empire, beating the tar out of your neighbors along the way.

The Good
It had nice graphics... the intro was nice, and the little guys running around and getting killed by elephants was cute.

The Bad
Good Lord... I was SOOO disappointed... I bought this in a sale box at the local Electronics Boutique and, having heard already so much about Age of Empires, was practically salivating... and man, did it suck! Sure, it looks cute, but the different civilizations are completely unbalanced, the tech tree is small, limited, and sucky, wonders are complete idiocy (someone builds one, go and nuke it or lose the game), the campaign mode is boring and every game ends the same: you try to survive until you build enough whatever and come over to kill. Sure, the same might hold true for Civ or C&C or Dune 2 or Alpha Centauri... but at least you have fun and options and along the way.

The Bottom Line
Avoid like the plague unless you ADORE this genre and are willing to forgive it's flaws. I've heard Age of Empires 2 was a vast improvement but I never dared to take a look.

The Good
The only thing good about playing this game one time is that decades from now you too can brag to your grandchild that you once played the first failures by Gates and co. I bet your grandchild will be impressed at your state of depravation.

The Bad
Comparing this Age of Empires to Warcraft II, which came out beforehand, is like comparing the Windows 2.1 interface to a Macintosh interface: The right way to steal an idea is to IMPROVE it! Not to MUTILATE it! I won't even bring up Starcraft, which blows the water even out of Warcraft II.

The Bottom Line
Describe? No, no, that's too painful. Suffice it to say that it can only improve from here.

The Good
The historical theme is quite nice. I'm not a historian but from what I can see it is more or less correct in it's historical descriptions (although "correct" is a bad word when talking about history, because history is not about facts but how we interpret what we THINK are facts). Anyway, this gives a somewhat educational touch to the game which I quite like.

The Bad
Well, the rest, more or less. There are no obvious flaws that jump at you when you start the game. It is just so... bleak. The graphics are boring to look at, and the menus would suit some Microsoft excell-program better. The illusion that you aren't just playing around with ones and zeros aren't there at all. It really feels like a computer programe, not some "alternative" reality. In short, there is no way in which I can ever feel involved in the game and that makes it uninteresting and boring, since the game is so depressingly slow. Most strategy games are slow, but when involving even the most slow-paced game becomes exciting (civilization is an excellent example). Age of Empires is just plain boring and depressing to look at. The graphics aren't bad in that sense, the game just looks bleak and uninspired. One of the most overrated games in the history of games, since it has virtually no entertainment value at all.

The Bottom Line
Well made, but oh so uninspired and boring. Bleak, boring and bad.

The Good
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Get rid of it NOW.

The Bad
What does this game and Windows have in common? Well, aside from it being written for Windows, it has the same crash factor, same speed and same "fun".

The Bottom Line
Well, in general I'd say this is "a piece of ****". But since this IS MobyGames and I can't swear, I'll say that this is "a huge pile of larvae-crawling dung".