Age of Empires II

           A few weeks ago I picked up and started playing a computer game that I bought many years ago, Age of Empires II. I had gone in to this game thinking that the experience would be far from good since most games don’t age well, either because of graphics, story or some other characteristic that has been long since abandoned by the industry. Yet, to my surprise the game experience was not that bad and maybe even good. Before I go into the game itself there are a few background things that I should address for the non-gamers out there.
 

Over a decade ago a game was released to the computer gaming community know as Age of Empires II, the sequel to the popular real time strategy (RTS) game call Age of Empires. In Age of Empires II, like in nearly every RTS, you control units in real time; you build your army, build your base and fight your enemy as it happens on screen. This is opposed to turn based strategy games (TBS) where each player has a turn to build and attack which is followed by other players turns (like the board games RISK or Axis and Allies). Like most strategy games of the time each culture (or race in some games) has its own special unit and different branching technology trees (for upgrades to units). Yet, the core of every culture was the same, so you could play as the Chinese and have units that were identical to the Franks except for there “unique unit” (and perhaps a few other units that the particular culture has access to) and in appearance.  Few RTS games of the day had every unit of each race be unique (heck this trait is still far between even in modern RTS games), hence why they are races rather than cultures, and while two different races may have units that are comparable to one another the units are not identical (this is true for games like StarCraft, WarCraft and Halo Wars).  The goal of all of these games is the same, to win. Most RTS and TBS games have multiple ways to win and all have the method of winning where you kill all of your enemies. Some allow things like cultural victories, or assassination victories, or even a mode where if you collect all of an item and hold it for a certain period of time you win.  These multiple methods of victory spice up the game since now you not only have to worry about an invading army but also an enemy winning by building a wonder. Age of Empires II is one of the games where you can win through various methods. Most games also have something called a campaign mode, which is a set of missions interlinking with one another. So you would have one culture or race do differing missions that led to other missions in that story arc. Many games even had multiple campaigns so that you could play as different races, all of which were qusi interdependent yet also partly related to one another, depending on the game that is.

Now that there is a general understanding of what the game is like mechanically I will go into my look at the game thirteen years after its release and say if it has held up over time. First off, as with any game over a decade old there is the issue of graphics. There have been numerous graphic engine changes over the years and it shows. In order to run the game without the grass and water being a clump of primary and secondary colors I had to turn off my computers explorer. This made the game look as it did all those years ago when it was first released (I don’t know why turning off the explore did this but hey whatever works). With the explore off the game didn’t look horrendous, but you can tell at first glance that it is dated visually, no three dimensional rendering, basic shading and a still kinda blocky feel.

The music and voiceovers aged well, they still sound as good as they did when it was released so the developers did a good job there. The story is as good as it was back then, the story, which is in the campaign mode, follows various historical figures; the tutorial follows William Wallace of Scotland, the first campaign follows Joan of Arc of France, the third follows Saladin of the Saracens, the fourth follows Genghis Khan of the Mongolians and the fifth follows Fredrick Barbarossa of The Holy Roman Empire. These stories are both compelling and informative, and while not being entirely historically accurate they do give the player enough to have a basic understanding of these figures. Heck the game did this so well that in high school I got an A on a quiz based solely on the information I had learned in the game on Fredrick Barbarossa. The game is a great example of tangential learning since it gives you some information on the surface that makes you want to learn more outside the game. Heck the game even has “in game” civilipedias which give brief histories on each of the civilizations in the game.

Age of Empires II tries hard to emerge the player in the experience, from having the various civilizations look visually different to having the units of said civilization having accents and using phrases of the native culture that they represent. They also have some units unique to each civilizations region in the world, for example those civilizations in the Africa and Middle East region have access to camels where the civilizations in Europe do not. I would say the emersion was as good as any RTS can be.

            Overall I would say that Age of Empires II holds up to this day and while there may be some graphical issues they can be overlooked. If you have a chance to get the new release (which came out a few years ago) go for it.