Age of Empires I & II Gold Collector's Edition for Windows

When I first came across this game sitting on the shelves at Wal-Mart, I had to stop and do a double-take. The fine people at Microsoft Games had made the first two games of their very popular real time strategy game, Age Of Empires, available together for the low price of $10. It was simply too good a deal to pass up. It's not just the bare bones versions of the games, either, you get the expansion pack for both of the games. I had played both games a little bit - enough to know that they were pretty good - and jumped at the opportunity. These first two AOE games certainly don't have the new car smell anymore and have been around the block more than once, but the games have intangibles that make it very easy to look past the years that have gone by since these games were first released.

For those not familiar with the Age Of Empires series, they are a series of real time strategy games set in medieval times. Depending on the settings you choose, you can start with very little and build your civilization from the ground up, progress through the ages, and dominate your enemies economically and militarily. You play the role of king, and control every aspect of your civilization, from what buildings are constructed to what natural resources your villagers collect to what enemy embankments your soldiers attack. It allows you to create and dictate exactly how you want to play.

Game Modes

For those that want to simply boot up the game and go, single player Random Map is the way to go. You can tweak certain things such as how many resources you start out with or how many enemies you have and what the teams are, ect. The meat and where you'll spend most of your single player time is definitely the campaigns. These campaigns are loosely based on historical events and figures. You fight battles and try to take over territory like historical figures such as Genghis Khan and Attila The Hun did back in their day. There's five campaigns in the second game, and all of them have about 6-8 different battles/missions in them, so they are time-consuming and something that can keep you occupied for a long period of time if you stay motivated to beat them.

Through this game has seen some years, the gameplay and graphics are still seamless and impressive. The controls are as simple or as complex as you'd like to make them. As their most basic, you're pointing and clicking the majority of the time, and navigating around the screen with the mouse and not really having to touch the keyboard. In addition, for maximum efficiency, AOE also has hotkeys for those who take the time to learn them. I personally prefer to do everything with the mouse, but the few hotkeys I have memorized come in very handy and would be an asset for anyone to learn and utilize.

The graphics, through not perfect or as detailed as newer games, AOE still holds its own. If you really look closely, some of the images of buildings and people in your village look a little grainy, however, on the whole, the graphics are more the sufficient. The maps you play on are pretty detailed too, as they have oceans, cliffs, differing types of forests depending on the location of your map. Overall through, everything is pretty well done and is very easy to tell the difference between different units and buildings. There is enough variation and detail there to make that very easy for you.

If I did have one complaint, it would be the variety of sounds that AOE produces. The overall quality of the sounds are okay, but the noises your villagers and soldiers make when you select them, the sound a building makes when you select it, the in-game music, ect is very repetitive and gets annoying after repeated plays. A little more variation would have been nice, but overall fewer sounds would have been better, IMO. There are some funny taunts you can use in multiplayer mode, however.

The differences between the first and second are actually fairly small, however, they're great enough that the majority of your time, if not all of it, will be spent playing the second installment and it's expansion pack. The first one is logically set a little earlier in history and features civilizations such as the Romans, while AOE II deals with the period after the Roman Empire falls. In addition to the graphics being sharper in AOE II, you also have more options in terms of buildings and military units. The first game offers some fun in working your way through the campaigns, but as could be expected, the sequel is the superior title of the two.

Final Thoughts

You really can't go wrong with Age Of Empires Gold Collectors Edition for Windows. You get two solid games for a very reasonable price that are challenging and will keep you busy. Unless you're running a dinosaur of a machine, the system requirements are not too needy and should run on almost all computers made in the last five years if not longer before that. If you've never played the AOE series and are into RTS type games, stop what you're doing and start living. Give AOE a chance.