Age of Empires Again and Again...

Worthy of having won the Wargamer Award of Excellence and being named Best Strategy Game of the Year by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (not this year).

Developed by Ensemble Studios, this game is part of the Age of Empires Series. The Age of Empires, Gold Edition was a gift almost 6 months ago. It contained the Age of Empires and the Rise of Rome expansion.

I have finally played every Campaign of the complete set to successful completion and thoroughly enjoyed each moment. Now I am enjoying the Death Match Scenario selections and seeking more difficult levels of play for familiar campaigns.

When you start the game, you may select the mode of play (Campaign, Scenario, Build your own scenario, on line or off line). This review focuses on the game as experienced by a single player.

For information concerning on-line play features, goto MSN Gaming Zone for details on login, rules, levels of play, tournaments and requirements.

The computer will offer Campaigns, Scenarios and Death Matches. The Campaign portion is further broken down into "sub-campaigns" based on historical events while the Death Match is a free for all, winner take all, sort of fight. This is enhanced by the ability to select your level of play difficulty.

Some of the selections allow the player the have multiple opponents at the same time, all controlled by the computer.
All of the options allow for more than one successful battle plan. Many of the options provide more than one set of victory conditions, such as building a "Wonder" or monument, collecting dispersed relics, controlling sites of ruins or killing off all of your opponents.

Once your selection has been made, the computer will provide you with objectives, hints and the ability to track progress through an Achievements page.

The game is started with the click of a finger and the race is on to develop the resources to achieve victory. This often means fighting off surprise attacks by computer generated enemies and wild animals while trying to build production and production capability.

You select those units of infantry, cavalry, special weapons, ships, archers or workers you feel necessary to achieve you objective(s).

This expansion pack, unlike the first AOE, allows the player to stack selections and command the development of more than one unit at a time, even though their creation is still sequential. There is also a greater number of natural resources available such as fish, stone, wood, gold and antelope. This combined with about 5 new units, makes the development of integrated unit forces a new challenge , especially for those of us who had just gotten use to the fundamentals in the first release (see the Age of Empires review To Arms).

The game selections may take from 1 to 3 hours to play through to completion. Some have taken me longer...some with multiple re-starts from half finished saved games, a couple have taken 2 hour increments over a series of days (Saved Game)and one or two I have blown through in under an hour.

There are over a dozen different sounds encountered during play. Grunts, lions, owls, elephants, siege weapons throwing stone or fire balls, drums and voices just to name a few. Sounds are an integral part of the game as they signal significant events such as attacks (which may be out of your current field of vision) or the creation of a new unit or the loss of a unit in conflict. The sound should be enabled on your system during play and set to a level the player is comfortable with.

One of the overwhelming features of the game is the graphics. At first glance the player can identify water, trees, dirt paths and rocks. Upon a closer look, the detail of the trees, their splintering during chopping, and the irregularity of the lumber recovered is certainly attention to detail by the magic pencils who created this art. The detail is so good in fact, that one might think that these images were drawn nearly to 1:1 scale prior to shrinking for the graphics during play. My 5 year old can identify many of the units, horse, elephant, bird, water fall, fish, whale, lion, "deer" from about 4 feet from the screen before I shut down the game for family time. There is no doubt in my mind why this game has won so many awards.

There are quite a few "cheat codes" available to alter play. I have not tried any of them because I am having too much fun just playing the computer. There are plenty of tips and tricks as well, but these are more fun to learn as you go. There are some observations in my review of Age of Empires which might shed some light on what to look for that you can later use to your advantage without cheating.

There are a lot of great reviews on this subject written by some experienced reviewers. I am trying to write to the standard set by those before me.

This game can be bought on line or at many traditional stores where great software is sold. For additional information:
Ref
wargamer.com
microsoft.com/games/empires
MSN Gaming Zone (free play...if you have the correct disk)