Age of Empires Online Review
A fine first step towards a truly great free-to-play model
You can visit the capital cities of your friends regardless of their civilization type. From there, you may complete defensive missions granting you and the owner of the city experience and item, utilize their special shops, and generally get a better idea of what is in store for yourself and your capital city simply by exploring all the buildings they have if they are at a higher level.
This mechanic works well to give the player a lot of visual and gameplay feedback to their progression. I found myself trying to hunt down very high level players in the chat just so I could visit their cities and check out how expansive their settlement had become in a way that I had never bothered to do with player’s armor or loadouts in other MMOs.
From a multiplayer perspective, the game has a lot to offer, as you would hope from any game with “MMO” in its description. One or two hours into the game, once you have completed the tutorials and been made familiar with all of the new persistent leveling and social mechanics, you will receive a wide array of missions that are co-op compatible. This allows you to gather up a party and play these missions with a friend. This is where AoE: O’s multiplayer problems begin to become noticeable. Even if both players have the quest in their log, only the party leader will have the default predominant spot on the map with all of its starting building and units. The secondary player is given a tiny starting settlement off to the side with only a single defensive unit. This leads to some class warfare between players with no one really wanting to have to take that more difficult, secondary position. Additionally, chests that can be discovered and collected are only given to the player picking them up, rather than two both players. There are even an odd number of these chests making it impossible to effectively split the loot between the two players.
PvP matches are here as well in both 1v1 and 2v2 setups across several maps. Due to the directly competitive nature of PvP and the fact that players at different levels and ages can have vastly different access to troops, this can become problematic, especially if you are hoping to play at lower levels. From my experience, most players had agreed that it was best to stay out of the PvP until you have hit level 25 in order to get an actually fair and balance level of gameplay. Prior to this point, you may find yourself only capable of constructing spearmen while your opponent has access to war elephants and siege weapons or even something as simple as archers that can swing the tide of battle easily in their favor. This, and the game’s lack of 3v3 and 4v4 matches, are the largest problems overall. Many people play RTSs solely for the PvP play (see Starcraft, for example), so it is a bit outlandish to require players to invest well over 20 hours in PvE content before giving them an actually fair and competitive level of PvP play.
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