A brave new direction
Microsoft truly took a big leap towards a completely new kind of gaming experience with this new addition to their excellent Age of Empires series, if nothing else it is a brave leap, but I am not sure it was the right one.
Before I had a chance to play the game, I was worried Microsoft just wanted to push through one of their existing brands to grab a piece of the successful Facebook gaming scene. Basically making a Farmville experience of AoE.
Farmville, as you may know, is mainly played by middle aged housewifes. And for me as a so called "hard core gamer", that would be a sour apple to swallow. :)
The game is definitively sprinkled with sugar and cute colorful graphics to make it easier to digest for the casual gamer, however, I was relieved to see the game did not lose its complexity during its transformation. It's easy to start playing, but you can still dive pretty far into the game as you discover more and more options. Especially the whole process of discovering new items, crafting your own weapons and utilities etc. is quite rewarding once you get into it.
But, the important part is, how does the actual game play? In fact, I think a pretty accurate description is to say the game plays exactly like the original AoE skirmish battles. Each quest you encounter is basically a skirmish battle with a simple story element attached.
Although these skirmish battles, or quests, do have some varying parameters like how the randomly generated landscape should look like in general, the strength of the opponent, and winning objectives, they are pretty much all the same.
Gone is the story mode from the original games, and wave goodbye to specialized missions where your enemy has a personality and adds some twists and turns to the mission as you play it.
So, what you are left with it basically a set of quests with little variety. The variety comes in form of what loot you can find, and how you can use it to improve your city and army for later.
That could be quite boring, except AoE is a pretty addictive game. It is fun to play and continuously rise in level, and you do get that just one more time feeling from playing, challenging yourself a bit more every time.
True, the AI is dumb, but you can let it compensate by being much stronger than you. This is true for most RTS games anyway.
As a seasoned RTS game player I miss the option to fine control the difficulty level. I found the normal game settings to be way too easy, it is just a matter of patience to win each quest. Some quests do have an Elite setting though, which is hard, but just because the computer cheats and throws units at you which are a gazillion times stronger than you are from the very beginning.
It would be nice with a standard skirmish mode where you can fine tune the opponent so that you reach your exact limit, challenging yourself. As the game stands now, it is either too easy or too hard (Elite mode).
All in all an entertaining and addictive game. Not as good as the previous titles. Be prepared to spend some $s on the game though, nothing is free in this world. I'd say a full game experience is still very cheap compared to most full priced games though.
All in all I give it an reluctant 8, because I did in fact play it a lot, despite all the games weaknesses, which means it did it's job. And, I am not that bothered by the lack of cosmetic cut-scenes and story elements anyway.