Game Reviews

Age of Empires II

Age of Empires II has women! You all know I loved the original; the
presence of a male only society had me suspecting some kind of binary
fission was occurring in the town center. In addition to adding women,
Age of Empires II has made enough good changes to qualify as a significant
improvement over the original. The look is improved in quality, but still
reminiscent of the old. Civilizations still start with the same structures,
but develop into four distinct directions, depending on the type. It would
have been better of there was a rotating 3D view (similar to Warzone 2100,
if you know with that game), but this one gets around the problem of seeing
what’s behind buildings by providing a blue outline for all units. The game
looks like the original, only smoother and better.
In general, strategy games play the same: gather resources, manage your
economy, research as necessary and build up enough units to overrun the
enemy. It’s common, but here it’s done extremely well. The technologies are
varied and the technology tree is diverse. Each civilization has a special
ability and unit that provides an advantage to intelligent players. Unit
matching is the best I’ve seen. Rather than relying on the standard long
range / short-range formation, each unit has a match that it can beat, and
one that can beat it. Swordsmen are weak against archers, but good against
Light Cavalry and so on. The artificial intelligence is much improved, taking
into account things like ‘tactics’. Monks can heal, and will do so
automatically, and units will automatically march in formation with the
strongest in front. If that’s not impressive enough, there are a variety of
formations to choose among. Little improvements like this are scattered
throughout the game, adding up to a huge quality adjustment. The subtleties
in the game make it much more fun to play than your average real-time strategy
game. The game has some good (but short), single player missions, although I
would like to see more of them. The random scenario generator is good enough
to take up the slack, and in multiplayer, this one really shines. There really
isn’t that much plot to the single player, but it is till fun. Occasionally,
there is a mission that I think was way too hard. I had to cheat to beat it,
and I ended up cheating quite a bit to beat it, it was so hard. The tutorial
is excellent for new players, even if the narrative accents are a bit thick.