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How will you rule the world? Conquer enemy civilizations?
Discover the world's secrets? Accumulate wealth? As the guiding
spirit of a Stone Age tribe, follow one of these paths to build
the greatest civilization on earth. Age of Empires is a real-time
strategy game, spanning ten thousand years, in which players are
the guiding spirits in the evolution of a small Ice Age tribe.
Starting with minimal resources, players are challenged to build
their tribes into great civilizations and choose from one of
several ways to win the game, including world domination by
conquering enemy civilizations, exploration of the "known" world,
and economic victory through the accumulation of wealth.
Review
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When you first play Age of Empires, a warm feeling develops in
your gut. Warcraft meets Civilization! Real-time empire-building!
And does it ever look sharp and feel right.
But an uneasy feeling builds as you get deeper into it, a sense
that all is not quite right. This is not quite the game you hoped
for. Even worse, it has some definite problems. The pitfall when
you review a game as anticipated and debated as this one is to
make sure you criticize it for what it is, not for what you wish
it was. I wish that Age of Empires was what it cled to be -
Civilization with a Warcraft twist. Instead, it is Warcraft with
a hint of Civilization. That's all well and good, but it places
it firmly in the action-oriented real-time combat camp, rather
than in the high-minded empire-building of Civilization. The
result is Warcraft in to, with slightly more depth but a
familiar feel.
Age of Empires places you on a in an unexplored world,
provides a few starting units, and lets you begin building an
empire. Each game unfolds the same way. You begin with a town
center and some villagers. The villagers are the basic laborers,
and the town center enables you to build more of them and expand
your settlement. The villagers are central to AOE: they gather
resources, build structures, and repair units and buildings.
Resources come in four forms: wood, food, stone, and gold. A
certain a of each is consumed to build various units and
buildings, research new technology, and advance a civ to the next
age.
There is no complex resource management or intricate economic
model at work here. What you have is the same old real-time
resource-gathering in period garb, with four resources instead of
one or two. As your civ advances, you develop greater needs for
these resources, but the way in which they are gathered and used
becomes only marginally more complex (certain research can cause
faster harvesting or more production). It appears on the surface
to be a complex evocation of the way early civs gathered and used
materials, but beneath the hood is the same old "mine tiberium,
buy more stuff than the other guys" model. It is the first hint
that AOE is a simple combat game rather than a glorious
empire-builder.
There's no denying the thrill the first time a villager chucks a
spear at an antelope and spends several minutes hacking meat from
its flank with a stone tool. This is the level of detail that
brings an empire-building game to life. If only those villagers
would grow and develop over the course of the game, it would make
it so much more interesting. If only they would trade in their
loincloths for some britches and maybe some orange camoue,
and switch from spears to arrows and s. Yes, that's another
game, but it could easily have been done in AOE, and why it
wasn't is a mystery.
The problem is that while enemy AI is savvy and aggressive (it
can afford to be since it appears to cheat with resources), your
units are -stupid. Path-finding is appallingly botched, with
units easily getting lost or stuck. There is a waypoint system,
but that hardly makes up for the fact that your units have
trouble moving from point A to point B if you don't utilize it.
units will stand idly by while someone a millimeter away
is hacked to pieces. They respond not at all to enemy incursion
in a village and wander lessly in the midst of battle. Was
this deliberate so that the gamer needed to spend more time in
unit management? If so, it was a poor idea, since there is simply
too much going on midgame to worry about whether your is
allowing itself to be butchered in one corner of the while
you are aggressively tending to a battle in another portion.
AOE obviously is sticking close to an early-empire motif, and
there's nothing at all wrong with that. Stone, Tool, Bronze, and
Iron are the four ages, and with each come new structures and
units. You don't earn these advanced ages - you buy them
with resources. Advancement is a simple matter of hoarding and
spending food and gold. The overall welfare of your state is
irrelevant as long as it survives: happiness is not measured,
trade is barely modeled, and the state exists merely to produce a
machine to crush everyone else on the . Naval power
has a woefully unbalancing effect upon gameplay, with a strong
navy able to shred the competition at the expense of reality.
Micromanagement is the name of the game in AOE. There is no unit
queue, and to build five villagers, you need to build one, wait,
build another, and so on. With units acting so stupidly, you
should be able to set their level of aggression and the manner in
which they attack (a la Dark Reign), but that is also not an
option. Diplomacy is relegated to tribute and nothing more, and
alliances are hard to form. You can be allied, neutral, or at war
with other civs, but if the radio button is still set to "allied"
when an nent starts firing on your units, your units will not
fire back, defend themselves, or even flee. They will just be
destroyed. Cues as to exactly what's happening on the are
obscure; the duty has been relegated to unrelated sound effects.
Does that bugle call mean my building is finished being built, or
my units are under attack? How about some help, people? Victory
conditions can also be irritating. There are several campaigns
that require that specific goals be met, and these quickly grow
tiresome. Thankfully, there is an excellent custom generator that
lets you set size, starting tech, resources, and other
features. This is the saving grace of AOE, and what kept me
coming back again and again. The main reason is that it let me
change some of the insane default victory requirements, such as
when the victor is the first to build a "wonder" (through another
massive consumption of resources) that stands for 2000 years.
These 2000 years can pass in about twenty minutes of game time.
That means that as soon as an nent builds a wonder, you
create a whacking huge navy to go over and blow it up. Not a very
subtle way to maintain an empire. In fact, there is no strategic
nuance: It is merely a brawny muscle contest.
If all these judgments seem harsh, it is only because Age of
Empires looked, and pretends, to be so very much more. It still
has tons of potential and a fundamental gameplay that remains
entertaining enough to overcome the flaws and merit a fair
rating. The system can go very far with some fine-tuning, but as
it stands it seems downright schizo. Is it a simplified
Civilization or a modestly beefed up Warcraft? It's almost as if
the designers started out to create one game and ended up with
another. With such beautiful production and the fundamentals of a
vastly entertaining game, it's sad that it fell short of the
mark. The disappointment is not merely with what AOE is, but with
what it failed to be. --T. Liam McDonald
Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
