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Our Score |
8/10 – Very, very good |
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The Good |
Excellent transition to console with very capable controls and more options than most games bother to give |
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The Bad |
The simple city building and battles may be a bit too simple for those who never experienced Age of Empires 2 the first time around |
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Release Date |
January 31st, 2023 |
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Developed By |
Forgotten Empires |
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Available On |
Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC |
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Reviewed On |
Xbox Series X |
Over 20 years ago, I was forced to sit next to my best mate Sam and watch as he showed me through Age of Empires. He was excited to show me the cheats and how he could get sports cars with machine guns to zip around the map, taking out the enemy soldiers. I, however, was bored as a rock. It was only when he lent me his copy of the original game after he got Age of Empires 2, that I really began to understand the fun in watching little men and women trot around town, chopping wood, farming land, and mining gold. Sam was really not the best advocate for this game, but I owe him a thanks nonetheless. If you’re reading this, Sam – thanks. And text me back…
Anyway, my point is that Age of Empires has been a part of my gaming life for almost as long as I’ve been playing games. Few franchises can sell themselves after two decades, and even fewer in the real-time strategy genre, especially on home consoles. The genre has traditionally called the PC its home due to the intimate nature and the fine control over complex menus afforded by a mouse and keyboard. But we’re in a new age, folks, where a simple wireless dongle can turn your console into a PC-like experience, negating the need for strained necks, crooked backs, and that horrible red sore patch on the wrist after a session binging a decent strategy game.
Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has already been around for a while since it was released a few years ago for the PC. I played it back then and spent way too many nights micro-managing my civilization to victory until the wee hours of the morning. And now here in 2023 with the real-time strategy game making the shift to Microsoft’s home consoles, I’m at it again. And it’s good. So good.
Most who play Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition on Xbox will most likely already know what the game is all about. It is, after all, aimed to be a trip down memory lane; an opportunity to replace the rose-tinted glasses and present a fresh update to a classic game, no false memories required. For those who stumble upon Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition while looking for their next Xbox Game Pass adventure, it’s a simple strategy game where players start with a small town center, a few citizens, and not much else. The goal is to gather resources and expand your tiny town into a thriving community of citizens working for the greater good, with that greater good being your army which you’ll need to use to conquer the world, or at least the sliver of it presented on each map.
Consider it a mix of city builder and war simulator without the complications. It’s barebones in some respects, but still deep enough that you can spend four hours on a single skirmish map against AI opponents.
The game is broken into a few different modes, and it’s here where my embarrassment will show. By that I mean in the 20 or so years that I’ve been playing Age of Empires, I’ve never bothered with the campaign mode. In any city builder, I always leave the campaign well alone and get stuck into the sandbox. Whether it be the brilliant Frostpunk, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Tropico 6 – whatever – I leave the campaign mode alone, and the same is true with Age of Empires, no matter which numbered entry I play. My reason is that the idea of building up a civilization, or in some cases, a theme park, only to have it rendered useless once a few arbitrary goals have been completed seems like a waste of time. And, honestly, can a real-time strategy game really deliver a narrative worthy of my time? This is subjective, of course, and there will be those who play solely to take on the historical battles. But it’s not for me, though for the sake of this review, I did dip into a couple of the campaign missions and had a good look at what was on offer. Still, it didn’t manage to take away from the Skirmish game mode, where I’ve spent most of my time.
There are of course some other game modes, such as co-op missions and the typical multiplayer suite. However, as I played the pre-release version of the game, I was not able to test the multiplayer experience. This wasn’t a big deal for me as I’ve never really been interested in the multiplayer component of Age of Empires, though once the game goes live for everybody, I’ll probably dip in and see what it’s all about. If I lose my first match, you can bet your resources that I’ll never touch it again, the sour puss that I am.
What I can say from my many hours spent in the Skirmish mode against the feisty AI is that it’s the full-fat experience made friendly for console users. It’s the same game that launched on PC, but with console controls for gamepad users. If you wince at the idea of playing a strategy game with a controller, I’d first point you towards Frostpunk, which has one of the best city-builder control schemes on console, and then I’d point you towards Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, which comes in a close second.
…most of us who play Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition are old geezers with back problems, and we really do appreciate the ergonomics of slouching on a couch.
The user interface has been completely reworked to accommodate the living room setup. Radial menus galore, and they’re intuitive enough that even if you skip the tutorial (I did because I’m impatient) you’ll still figure it out after a short while. It works, and it works really well, to the point that I actually ended up preferring to play with a gamepad rather than lugging my mouse and keyboard over from my desk.
If you really can’t stand the idea of playing with a controller in hand, you can use a mouse and keyboard by plugging a wireless dongle into your console and changing the options in the main menu. Annoyingly, you can’t change the control input mid-game, so once you start, you’re stuck with whatever control input you’ve selected, at least until you can get back to the main menu and change this. I tried with the keyboard and mouse setup and, rather cleverly, the game changes its user interface to the more familiar PC version, which I thought was a nice touch. It makes for a seamless transition for veterans who want to spend hours building armies and collecting resources without having to hunch over a PC desk, because let’s face it, most of us who play Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition are old geezers with back problems, and we really do appreciate the ergonomics of slouching on a couch.
Another carryover from the PC version – and this took me by surprise – was the inclusion of graphics options, where you’re able to tweak the visuals to your preference. There are the usual PC presets, ranging from Ultra all the way down to Low. Being the graphics whore that I am, I opted for Ultra, and the game gave me a warning that there may be some issues in the late game with these graphical settings. However, after a dozen or so Skirmish games, I never noticed any slowdown, glitches, or otherwise. It ran perfectly fine, though there were the occasional two-second pauses when the autosave kicked in, but nothing to take me away from my empire-conquering ways. I am British, after all. It’s in my blood…
After a dozen or so hours in Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, I can safely say that it’s the real McCoy. This is not a watered-down port to give Microsoft an easy first-party Xbox Game Pass release. It’s the real deal and as feature complete as the PC edition, which is quite an accomplishment. A myriad of quality-of-life improvements makes the original game, while still a classic, very much redundant. The only reason to keep hold of the original is to preserve those big beautiful boxes PC games used to ship in. We’re in a new age now, and Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is the perfect example of taking an ancient game and giving it just enough love to make it feel almost new, something that many other remasters and re-releases so often miss the mark on.
