Recent reviews by eli J

I feel bad giving this a thumb's down. I can tell the developers meant well and put some love into this. It LOOKS and sound great too.

But do I recommend you play it? No.

You may be tempted to return to the original Age of Empires if you're nostalgic for the days when you'd log onto your dial-up and peruse various shoddy websites for new game demos. It was a really cool game back then. No sci-fi or fantasy trappings, just historical campaigns based on real empires and eras on our planet.

But man it has no aged well. You just can't go back to the grandfather of this franchise. Age of Empires II expanded and improved SO MUCH on the original that it's barely the same game and I can't recommend spending time with AOE1 now that both have received a very generous helping of remastering.

At the core of it, AOE1 is just clunky. The population caps are lower, the units have no concept of how to group up properly, building placement and tiling feel much finickier, the gameplay is sluggish on slower speeds and then cartoony on higher speeds, and the AI is a cheating poohead. You feel like you're micromanaging a couple of sluggish, braindead soldiers every second you're playing, trying to stay ahead of an AI who is perfectly managing dozens of units at a time, simultaneously, always.

The campaigns feature some really cool settings, some undercovered in games (Hittites?) and others very well represented (Rome, baby). But the actual missions are just obnoxious. Sometimes you're pitted against way too many AI opponents, all perfectly managing their armies, while you're stuck with 50 POP to fight them all off. Others require managing a tiny force to near perfection. It might be less annoying if the game's unit pathing and lack of unit formations didn't leave me feeling like I was fighting the game more than anything.

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade. Again, this doesn't feel like a cash grab at all. it feels like a labour of love. I just don't know how much I love the original anymore and no amount of fancy building destruction animations can change that.