Recent reviews by Matthew *-*

Oh boy, here we go! Hopefully this time we'll see some change in this absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of a game management.
A few points to make, just so this won't look like simple review-bombing:
> This has been cooking for years now. Every year that passes, the more broken as ♥♥♥♥ mechanics are added, the more unstable and badly optimized the game gets, the more expensive everything in-game becomes.
> The grind is unbearable, even if you DO have premium! You want to retain players, Gaijin? Start by making their time feel appreciated.
> Not only does this company simply ignore 99% of the feedback the players and partnered creators give, they are now resorting to censorship! Yes, deletion is the fate of most of the posts in the official forums that incite players to demand for the company to actually start giving a ♥♥♥♥ about the people that want to play their game!

Well Gaijin, you can kiss my ass. I have wasted way more time on this game than Steam tracks (due to the external old launcher), and I swear to God, this has been the worst time investment I have ever made.
Some are worried that the game will close after this commotion - I say great, it should have closed about three years ago. This trainwreck of a company believes that, because they have no competent competitors in the genre, they can do as they please, and it is way past time that they realized they cannot continue doing so.
Goodbye, War Thunder, and ♥♥♥♥ you, Gaijin. Almost like Frontier did with Elite: Dangerous, you had a product filled to the brim with potential, and a dominance on the market to actually develop it properly - and you didn't. Instead, you shamefully promoted shady tactics and dismissed feedback as if it didn't exist. Hopefully you will rot and be forgotten, and someday a new, better game, made by a less ♥♥♥♥♥♥ company, will take your place.

Updated review, since I bought the game again some months later after refunding it and I'm not feeling as upset as on release.

This game is a remaster, so I expected some nicer visuals and sounds, along with much needed QoL improvements. I bought the premise that it "took a lot of work" from the dev team, and was hoping for an all-around better version of the original AoE 3.
While we did get updated graphs + sounds, and some QoL improvements, the product itself is not amazing.

First, the positives:

• This is, mostly, your standard Age of Empires III experience. If you liked the originals, you will most likely like this one as well.
  
• The multiplayer has recieved a much needed revamp, and I didn't experience any problems with it aside from very long loading times.
  
• There is new content being added, even if it's paid DLC. I didn't buy any of them, but new content is always good news.
  
• The unit group selection limit was increased from 50 units to 95. No clue why not 100, but it's a good improvement.
  
• Some historical innaccuracies and potentialy offensive portrayals were corrected, mainly concerning the nations from the Warchiefs expansion. Some may argue that this is pointless, but I guess making less people upset is a nice move.
  
• All of the shipments are now unlocked and are readily avaliable to be used, removing the need to either modify save files or grind for them.
  
• Achievements for this game now exist. It's a nice feature, I guess?
  
• Finally, this product is cheaper than the original game. This is weird to say the least, but it is a better deal nowadays.

Now, the negatives.

• While the graphic update is nice, it absolutely does not justify the ridiculously increased specs this game demands, especially the storage required.
  
• Second, if I'm paying for a remaster, I should not recieve a product that is inferior to the original in any way. This game manages to have objectively worse AI for units regarding the attack move order and general pathfinding. This leads to some weird moments, such as when villagers will finish cutting a tree and will forget that they had a task, and proceed to just stand there doing nothing, even if they should be perfectly capable of continue doing their jobs, as they did in the originals.
  
• Third, this game lags A LOT when there are lots of units on the screen, like 50+ units.
  While the originals did lag a bit in this situation, the framerate here goes from ~60 to astonishing five. It's quite the awful experience to train a massive army to just to see a slideshow of a battle.

Conclusion:
I made this negative review as a way to express how frustrated I am, both as a fan and as a customer, because the new flaws of the game were never acknowledged or patched. It feels like the devs don't care, and it hurts.
The game itself, however, is mostly fine. Is it the definitive experience it promises? No. But if you just want the experience of playing it, and aren't as nitpicky as I am, go for it.


Old review:
They somehow made it worse than the original game. Not only it's terribly optimised (it's so bad the frame rate is the same at max low and max high), but the textures are worse, the UI is horribly organised and will not scale properly and even the cinematics are worse. The sounds are stange too but that might just be me. I'm really disappointed, so much that I asked for a refund. This really feels like a scam, like I paid for a bootleg edition of the game.