Age of Empires Definitive Edition Impressions

Often times, when you remember a game from your youth, you tend to look at it through rose coloured glasses. In preparation for the review of Age of Empires Definitive Edition, I pulled a very old PC out of the basement, set it up, and ran my own personal copy of Age of Empires: Rise of Rome. And ladies and gentleman, that game is awful, especially when you look at all the great Age of Empires games that have launched since then. When Microsoft announced that we would be getting a new Age of Empires experience, all remastered and brought into the 21st century, I was incredibly excited. Does it make the game playable and fun? Let’s take a look!

Tons to Do

One thing I can say for Age of Empires Definitive Edition is that there is tons of things to do when you load it up. From custom games, to multiplayer matches, to the plethora of campaigns and scenarios, for under $25, you likely won’t find a game that offers up this much. There are nearly a dozen campaigns to play through, each with roughly 10 scenarios to finish. The length to beat each one varies: I finished a few within 20 minutes, while others took well over an hour. As you play through all these campaigns, you’ll get to see everything the game has to offer, and it ultimately will prepare you for when you go online, pinpointing which civilization you will ultimately play as.

Online is robust, with tons of people available and dozens of matches to join. Whether you are playing King of the Hill, or just a simple conquest game, there is something for everyone online. I found a fair bit of mismatching based on skill levels, but there are those that tag their games with “advanced” or “noobs” which is helpful to a point.

Beautifully Redone

I cannot stress enough how much work the developer put into remastering this game. It wasn’t simply new textures and a new coat of paint, but rather a complete rebuild from the ground up. Animations are smoother and more defined, graphically, the maps have never looked better, and everything, even during heavy battle sequences, is sharp and crystal clear. The audio has been improved, taking the original midi music and sound affects and bring them into the modern age. Everything sounds and plays like it did 20 years ago, but looks like a modern title.

Difficulty Concerns

We talked at length in a previous article about the difficulty concerns, and we will just copy some of that below. You can read the full article here!

When playing through a specific campaign, you start with a small town, 3 villagers, and 3 club men; you also stat with roughly 200 of each resource. What no one expects to happen, however, is for 5 horse scouts to entire your camp at the 2:20 second mark of the game, and begin terrorizing you. Should you somehow end up prepared for that – it’s unlikely you will be in 2 minutes – that is followed up by another attack of 2 more horse scouts and a handful of axe men. All of this occurs in under 5 minutes.

The only way for me to successfully complete this scneerio was to send all three of my villagers to construct a wall, blocking their entrance into my camp. I’ve played Age of Empires long enough to know that this is not the intended path to victory in an campaign game.

This difficulty extends over to custom games as well. The general Age of Empires formula is that enemy AI will attack relentlessly the player with the highest score. For fun one evening, I loaded up an 8 player custom game with easy AI, 2 players per team. And wouldn’t you know it: within the first 5-6 minutes raiding parties from the 6 enemy teams started riding into my camp, despite the fact that I had the second least points at the time.

Something is broken here, and I hope it gets fixed.

Conclusion

Age of Empires Definitive Edition is definitely worth a play, and when you consider how cheap it is to purchase, it instantly becomes a no brainer. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game over the past few weeks, and would highly recommend it for everyone. Make sure to check it out soon, and let us know what you think!

8.5/10