Age Of Empires: Definitive Edition Review: Antique Revival
Booting up Age of Empires: Definitive Edition for the first time is immediately surprising. The original game launched more than two decades ago, but it’s been refined and revived for 2018, ready for modern audiences–or at least old players with new PCs and missing CD keys. It begins with pomp as a curt opening trailer plays, showing off the upgraded visuals and the new, orchestral score. As a returning player, that moment feels like coming home.
The in-game scenario editor, too, offers up some powerful level-building and even campaign-creation tools. It’s a bit complex, requiring you to have an external file organization system for your campaign maps and the like, but it’s still quite robust for those who want it. Just about all the tools you need to design your own entire plots are there, too. You can, with some effort, create a historical campaign more-or-less akin to what you’d play in the main game. Or you can get silly with it and have a map made of forests where players will have to log their way to a foe, opening up some very unusual tactics and strategies.
Other changes might not get quite the same fanfare but are nonetheless vital to keeping Definitive Edition relevant. Improved pathfinding, tools for locating stray villagers and military, attack-move commands, and plenty more have all been folded into the remaster, making for an impressive bump to general feel and smoothness of the game.
Unfortunately, there’s still a lot that just isn’t quite there, by modern standards. The limited units–particularly the lack of unique ones for each faction–can make play feel homogenous very quickly. Structures aren’t as developed either, meaning your ability to run more complex strategies is limited. You won’t find extensive unit queuing, hotkeys, shift-commands, or any of the countless gameplay improvements RTS designers have come up with over the intervening decades.
If you’re set on playing the original Age of Empires, this is far and away the best way to do so. That said, real-time strategy is a very feature-heavy genre. While this is the tightest the original AoE has ever been, it’s still sluggish and stripped-down compared to almost any modern offering.
Source:: GameSpot Reviews
