Game Review: Age of The Empires: The Age of Kings

This game is really fun to play. You can play as one of five factions being either the Britons, Franks, Mongols, Saracens or Japanese. Each army have their unique hero’s and the campaigns are based around the stories of these heroes with a lot of historical accuracy. For example you can play as Joan of Arc saving the Franks from the British invaders. Or you can play as Genghis Kahn going around and conquering the Middle East.

This game is a turn based strategy but maintains the same feel of it’s P.C counterparts. Instead of being quite quick with your keyboard and mouse trying to keep up with everything you can go about it in a more sluggish matter making the best decisions and thinking everything through, a bit like and advance game of chess. One thing about this game is that it isn’t short. With a 25 – 30 hour campaign mode and extensive skirmish and multiplayer mode there is plenty to do. Plus as you complete campaign levels you gain points which can be used to get extras like special units and extra skirmish maps further increasing this games longevity. This game features an excellent multiplayer system although no internet play. If you have friends with this game you can play turn to turn via wifi on everyone’s consoles. But what I really like is the fact that you have a hot seat mode. You can have 4 people playing on one console and being turn based passing the console around really doesn’t effect the game play ( unless you forget to end the day and everyone sees what you have done ).

Another great point of this game is the visuals. It is played from an isometric view point like many great strategy games and the graphics are nice. On the bottom screen you can control your armies using either the touch screen or button controls. On the top screen you can view unit, structure or terrain information and when your units come to battle you can view the battle sequence. The battle sequences have a nice 3-D graphical style and in despite the fact that they often have minor but noticeable errors add quite a lot to the game.

One of the points which isn’t so positive is that it can get quite slow. Whether that the A.I can get a bit slow to make up its mind when there are 3 or 4 players or that moving around is a bit slow there is a lot about this game that is slow. Overall this is a great game with high marks from most reviews and high marks all around with me.

Fried Smash Weasel (Pierce)

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Scores (Out of 10)

Graphics – 9.0

Sound – 8.0

Gameplay – 8.5

Overall – 8.5