The first impression Age of Empires 2 makes on you is "what a great game". This actually begins before you even play it. On the box it says "you have 1000 years to lead your people through the middle ages to greatness [...] conquer the world through military might, rule through commerce and diplomacy, or seize power by means of intrigue and regicide. There are many paths to power, but only one civilization will reign supreme." Sounds great, right? Sounds like you'll have a world map (or at least a map of Europe, Asia and Africa - which really ought to be enough for mankind), 1000 years (which should mean a few weeks of "real time" at least) and 13 civilizations involved in a complex military and political game.

Well, you won't.

The maps are square, small and usually made up. If you put 13 civilizations in one game you wouldn't have room to move. There's no diplomacy involved besides telling your units to attack no enemy units, only military units or all units and an average game lasts less than five hours. Commerce means sending a trading cart to a market and getting gold. Regicide is a different game mode where you just have to kill a specific unit (the king) and not destroy the whole enemy civilization. And as to intrigue... well, it's intriguing how some people seem to consider AOE2 such a brilliant game.

The game is basically a (much) better-looking (though possibly worse-sounding) version of Warcraft (or Warcraft II), which wasn't such a brilliant game to begin with (a Dune II clone which - IMO - didn't come close to the original). Where things turn ugly (as unfortunately seems to happen with most games today) is when it comes to gameplay.

But lets start with installation. The game's CD has some sort of copy protection that makes it terribly slow on some drives and completely incompatible with others (isn't it nice to find out, after you buy a game, that you need a new CD drive?). On my 40x drive the videos jump so much that they look like a slide-show. One out of 5 times I run the game, it insists the CD isn't in the drive. Naturally, if you buy a pirate version (and there *are* pirate copies of the game), you pay less and get a regular CD, which runs fine. Next time I feel like buying a Microsoft game, I'll know. No, I'm not recommending people should buy pirate games - just that the people making games should make sure that the people who pay for them are getting a product at least as good as those who don't.

I tried to run the game under Windows NT (which is the OS I used at the time). First, for some unexplainable reason, the screen frequency changed from 75 Hz to 60 Hz, meaning the image got completely distorted (I had to re-adjust the monitor), then the mini-map started scrolling up and didn't stop until it reached the top. I scrolled back with the mouse and it scrolled back up. Eventually I found out I need service pack 5 to play the game in NT (why should a service pack be needed to get proper scrolling is beyond me). Service pack 5 is a 40 Mb download available from a Microsoft site where the best speed I can get is around 2 Kb/s. How hard would it have been for Microsoft to include service pack 5 in the CD? The CD only comes with 300 Mb of data anyway, so they had plenty of room. Needless to say, I un-installed the game and installed it in my Windows 98 disk, which I use just for games that don't run under NT. Meanwhile I replaced NT with Windows 2000, but the game is still in my Windows 98 disk, so I don't know how well it runs under Windows 2000.

The videos still didn't play properly (in Windows 98) and the game still insisted the CD wasn't in the drive from time to time, but map scrolling was ok. Unfortunately, the game crashed every ten minutes. I eventually traced this to the fact that I had a fixed setting for my page file, instead of letting Windows 98 decide its size. Strangely, 128 MB of RAM plus a 128 MB pagefile wasn't enough for AOE2, which, according to the box, only requires 32 MB to run. I set the page file size to automatic and since then the game has only locked up once. Sometimes however, especially when the computer is using trebuchets to attack, the game starts stuttering and slows down to a ridiculous speed (it gets back to normal when I destroy the trebuchets).

Ok, now let's move to gameplay.

The main problem with AOE2's gameplay is that it resembles a board game more than it resembles a military or historical simulation: although the rules provide a suitable "depth" of play, they are not realistic.

Let's say one player decides to train archers while the other is researching crossbowmen. After some time, one player has, say, 10 archers, and the other is just beginning to train his first crossbowman. The first one possibly has better defence, but the second one will have better units in the end, right? Wrong. When the first player researches crossbowmen, all his archers magically become crossbowmen. And, naturally, 10 archers beat one crossbowman. The same thing goes for structures. Build twenty watch towers, later research keeps and all your towers magically become keeps. Despite the large amount of parameters, the overall philosophy of the game is "build a damn big army as soon as possible". When technologies work retroactively, big strategical options lose most of their meaning. In fact, most battles come down to how big your army is. In AOE2, size matters.

It's not just the "magical upgrade" that's un-realistc. The computer's tactics also don't make much sense (but you will use them, because they're the ones that work). What the computer does is this: it starts building military structures right next to your town. In AOE2 it takes about the same time to train two soldiers as it does to build a barracks (and both are faster than killing a wolf). In fact, building can be almost instantaneous if you use enough workers. So what the computer does is, very early in the game, build barracks, archery ranges, etc., around your town. Since siege weapons only appear late in the game and soldiers take forever to destroy a building, this means the computer can attack you at any moment from right next to your town, and you can't do a thing to prevent that. Eventually you learn to do the same, and make the game even. And rather silly.

And what about the artificial intelligence? Well, it isn't. And now let me quote Counter-Strike's programmer on the subject of artificial intelligence. When he was asked if the AI of the hostages had been improved he said "well, we made them run faster and surprisingly this makes them look much smarter". That's AOE2's philosophy. The game runs way too fast to let you control things properly, and gives the computer an unfair advantage. The computer doesn't need to jump to different areas of the map. It doesn't need to look for a specific unit. It doesn't need ten attempts to select a unit in the middle of a battle. And it doesn't need to go looking through the map to find out that five villagers are standing idle beause they ran out of wood to chop in a specific place. The game would have been fair if you could pause it, or at least make it run at, say, 1/10th of normal speed. But you can't. The slowest it gets is about half normal speed, which doesn't really make such a big diference when you're trying to coordinate defence on two fronts plus an attack plus unit production plus farm rebuilding (one of the most annoying tasks ever to be devised by the human mind and certainly *the* most annoying task ever to be included in a game) plus technological advancement plus building repairs plus fishing plus... well, you get the picture. The computer also cheats in other ways; it's omniscient as well as omnipresent (that's 2 out of 3 on the way to divinity). When I try to use a catapult against an incoming army, for example, the computer-controlled units move away from the impact point on the exact moment the catapult is fired. Now, how exactly do they know that a) a catapult was fired and b) that it was aimed precisely at that spot? Their range of sight isn't even enough to *see* the catapult. So I'll tell you how: They have access to your orders. They don't need to see what's going on because they *know* what's going on. Apart from that, the "AI" isn't very "I". In "highland" maps, the computer insists on using the "bridge" instead of attacking by water, even in the "hardest" setting, so if you build a gate, a castle and a couple of towers near the bridge, you've practically won. Also, the computer systematically attacks guard towers with a few archers and a few soldiers, which means they all get killed and the tower gets only slightly damaged (and can be repaired before they attack again). The only problem with this is that the computer does this simultaneously on 4 or 5 towers, meaning you have to keep jumping back and forth in the map (besides the usual jumping you have to do to control your villagers and rebuild your farms). After doing this for a while on one of the hardest settings, I gave up. Not because the computer was winning (in fact it was committing ritual suicide), but because it was too stressing. Apparently it's possible to have more than one person control the same civilisation in a network game. Maybe what they meant when they said the game involved 13 civilisations was that it took 12 people to control a civilisation at the speed the computer does. Buf if you don't mind the frantic mini-map action and if you don't get mad with your units' lack of common sense, the computer isn't too hard to beat. And victory can be quite rewarding, not because you feel like a military genius but because you finally get a chance to rest.

So the game boils down to this: nice graphics, rather un-interesting sound, reasonable control (the formations are nice although I'd like more control over them) spoiled by the game's excessive speed, poor, cheating AI, repetitive, illogical and often frustrating gameplay. If you liked any other RTS game, chances are you'll like this one for the first couple of days and then decide to re-play Command & Conquer for the 10th time. I did and it's as much fun as the other 9 times.