Review: Age of Empires: Mythologies

Developer of the last Age of Empires, Digital Eclipse, took a bold move in turning one of the PC’s much-loved real-time strategy titles into a turn-based strategy game. And while many of the series’ fans took the change surprisingly well, it turned out to be too bug-ridden for many to persevere with.

Two years on, and under new management, Age of Empires returns, with Griptonite Games hoping to learn from the original’s failings, and develop a title worthy of challenging the best that the DS has to offer.

It’s all Greek to me

Age of Empires: Mythologies features three civilizations; the combative Norse, the defensive Egyptians and the godly Greeks, each containing their own single-player campaign. Each civilization requires villages to be built and resources to be gathered, in order to develop more units to take into battle. Knowing when to gather resources, when to build, when to create a shrine and when to train another unit is as important as knowing when to attack and when to defend. While one bad choice won’t necessarily lead to instant death, it will certainly make things that much more difficult.

Equally as important is what units you train and what units you send in against the enemy. Mythical units are extremely powerful when up against human units, but stick them in a fight against a hero and you can almost certainly wave them goodbye. Conversely (and perhaps a little bizarrely) sending a hero unit in against human units will lead to them having a huge chunk of their energy removed. Each faction has a range of mythical and human units to train, ranging from archers to cavalrymen, and again these have strengths and weakness against each other.

Another consideration is when to age-up. Ageing up gives you access to more powerful units, as well as granting more godly powers which, when used wisely, can be the difference between victory and defeat on the latter levels. There are important choices to be made on every turn, and carefully planning your moves according to the situation, and having the foresight to predict what your opponent is likely to do, makes for a much more deeper experience overall than Advance Wars.

I lack soul but I am a soldier

Some of the campaign’s levels last in excess of an hour (on first play-through) and you can expect to get at least 20 hours out of the single-player campaign alone. There are then the extra skirmish levels to conquer, and a very extensive multiplayer mode, which offers a cut-down single-cart mode and online play. In addition there’s an excellent hot-seat mode, where you pass the DS around, which makes it an ideal game for like-minded friends/families who may only have the one DS to play on.

But where AoE triumphs over many of its competitors in some areas, it’s left lagging behind in others. For instance, the fixed isometric viewpoint can make some of the battles very difficult to manage, especially as each unit is rather large in size and can easily block out the unit behind it. The stylus control is also terrible, but thankfully you can revert to using the d-pad and buttons. The AI also has an annoying habit of producing far too many units based on the resources it has available, which leads to unbalanced gameplay.

More importantly AoE lacks the soul that some of its competitors have. Drawing comparisons again to Advance Wars, there’s no doubt that AoE wins the tactical battle, but it does so in a very nonplussed fashion. It flits between being serious and taking a more light-hearted view (but the humour almost always misses the mark), you never have an opportunity to care for any of the characters, and at the end of the very extensive 20-25 hour campaign, it all comes to a close with a bit of a whimper. It’s definitely one of those games you complete and then immediately forget.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If your emphasis is purely on strategic and tactical gameplay, AoE is unlikely to disappointment. It may lack soul and charm, but AoE has that essential ‘just one more turn before bedtime’ appeal to it. If however you want a more rounded package, something that has charm in addition to gameplay, and one that is likely to live long in the memory afterwards, there are many better suited titles to choose from.