Age of Empires Online Review
Posted by
sirdesmond
on
For many, Age of Empires has long stood as one of the hallmarks of not only the real-time strategy genre but as one of the greatest PC game franchises of all time. In Age of Empires: Online, the series makes the jump from AAA retail title to downloadable, free-to-play RTSMMO (what a mouthful). At the time, I was wary at the time of its announcement last year and worried that we would get nothing more than a glorified Facebook game riddled with over-priced micro-transactions. Thankfully, I couldn’t have been more incorrect.
It should be said right from the get-go that this is an RTS you have played before. It is very similar to previous titles in the franchise and is, in many cases, simpler overall. It is a macro-focused game with each scenario having a good ten minute spin-up time where you are focused entirely on resource production. While other RTSs like Starcraft have a large micro-focus, you won’t find much use for that here. Age of Empire: Online is a resource game from beginning to end. Veterans of the genre will be up to pick it up and play right away, and newcomers won’t have a hard time learning with the ample amount of tutorial missions.
While it doesn’t really break any new ground in terms of its actual gameplay mechanics, it does employ a number of MMO mechanics that act to make a number of small (and normally disconnected) battles feel somehow similar to an overall character progression seen in most MMORPGs. This is done mostly through your capital city, a gameplay mechanic introduced in Age of Empires III and utilized in a similar way here.
Although every mission will see you restarting and rebuilding your settlement to include all of the resource gatherers, buildings, and units you need to complete the objectives, your capital city grows persistently with your account in level and size. As you progress and your civilization levels up, unlocking new units, upgrades, and building types, so too does the number of buildings and abilities of your capital city. A number of things can be built in your city including everything from storage buildings that give you additional inventory slots much like bags in a standard MMO to production facilities that create a number of crafting items over a certain amount of real world time.
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.
Age of Empires: Online is one of the first forays into the western free-to-play space that feels right and it does this mostly by replicating the shareware model of yesteryear while incorporating in modern online transactions and social interaction. Just as I had the shareware game Doom 95 as a child and loved it. It wasn’t until years later that I realized what I had played was only the first of many episodes. Such is the case with Age of Empires: Online.
Without needing to spend a penny (and rarely ever being asked/prompted to do so), you are treated to over 20 hours of content that is fun and (mostly) fully-featured RTS experience. Many RTS games have shipped at full retail prices with far less content than what you can get here entirely for free. If you do decide that you enjoy the game and want to explore that content further as well as add to your current experience throughout with additional special items, storage, etc. you pay a single, but larger fee and until everything for that civilization. Where many free-to-play (or pay-to-play as many like to call them) attempt to nickel and dime you endlessly with a wide array of minute and time-based items, Age of Empires: Online respects the player enough to give them a lot for nothing and even more for something.
Ultimately, Age of Empires: Online is not a true successor to Age of Empires III and those hoping to get that in-depth, realistic, and more hardcore experience will not find it here (for the most part), but for those looking for a more casually played RTS taking some of the best components of Facebook games, creating interesting new bits of innovative, and utilizing a pricing model that won’t make you feel cheated (for both non-paying and paying players), they will be pleasantly surprised. A fine first step towards a truly great free-to-play model, Age of Empires: Online is a good game befitting of its namesake that will hopefully continue to improve as more items, civilizations, and environments are added in the planned seasonal updates.