With its streamlined interface and modern makeover, AoM is itself a mythical beast: a sequel that's simultaneously deeper and more accessible than its predecessor. [10 Jan 2003, p.76]
It was the first 'real' game I ever played in my life, revisited it recently and it still holds up extremely well after nearly 23 years. Pure masterpiece
AoM takes what makes both the "Age of Empires" series and the "Warcraft" series great, and blends it all together into a tasty frappe, and the end result is simply divine.
It's just so frickin' wild and cool. You can get whole forests to come to life and attack your enemies, build huge monsters like the Hydra (yes, it grows more heads as it takes damage), and pound the enemy city into a crater with meteor storms.
While AoM sports a new graphics engine and three unique factions, on the whole it plays very much like its predecessors. Too much like its predecessors, if you were hoping for a truly different game experience.
My experience with Age of Mythology was one of apathy and boredom... Think of AoM as Led Zeppelin’s "Stairway to Heaven." Sure, it’s a great song, but do you really want to hear it over and over again?
Iconic RTS. The campaign, multiplayer, level design, unit variety, and macro/micro gameplay were ahead of its time, and it still holds up as one of the best games for your money today.
So this review is mostly for the single-player portion of the game although I do like the general mechanics such as mythical creatures and heroes which are cool and the game is probably fun in multiplayer too.
The difficulty in this game is insane, it's either a walk in the part level or absolutely insane on Titan difficulty. Also on Titan difficulty the difference between the levels is more obvious than ever, they're either too easy or way too hard and you never know at the start of the level. I'm playing the Dwarf campaign, particularly chapter 4, right now and 5 minutes into the game you're hit by 100 supply of enemy units including mythical creatures and highly upgraded infantry and you have 4 raiders and 15-20 workers. Obviously the game uses some scripts to say when they'll unleash their full power but as a player, I'm not going to review the game files or spend 2 hours trying to learn the script so to avoid being smashed in the ground and having literally no way to prevent it. On Hard diffculty on the other hand, the enemy rarely attacks and you can breeze through every level in the campaigns without any difficulty. How is there such a difference between the game giving you 5 minutes to min-max and 20 minutes? I'm definitely not wasting hours tring to trial and error every combination on the slim chance I can bug the enemy AI to follow some obscure pathing or get it stuck in a forrest somewhere. On the flip side, when the game actually gives you some leeway so you don't have to resort to bugging the AI, the campaigns on Titan difficulty are usually quite fun, they can turn a 20-30 minute mission on Hard into an actual achievement to complete the level. Some levels I had to mine every gold mine on the map to even have a chance at beating the level (Dwarf 3) and it felt competitive even when the enemy cheats a lot in resources.
Generally the story is interesting, some levels are way too easy and simple, in fact most are, but the story as a whole is intriguing and I liked Arkantos' journey. You go around Europe and Africa in the pursuit of the villain and while individually the levels dont have a lot of dialogue or cinematics, when you combine the whole campaign it's quite enjoyable.
I like the mythical creatures and the heroes portion plus there are so many different units and God Powers and upgrades you can choose so every level feels at least a little different. Granted, in my opinion, many units are not viable but you have enough of a choice whether you want to emphasise heavily on archers, infantry, cavalry or spam the enemy with mythical creatures so missions are quite fun to complete.
So overall, if it weren't for the absolute botchery of difficulties in the game ranging from a breeze to a sweat shop shift, I'd have given the game a 9, ignoring of course that visuals, bugs and pathing are not up to modern standards but that's to be expected of a 20+ year old game.
Let me start off my saying that I am a huge fan of AOM, it is one of my favorite games of all time.
This reboot, however, is simply pitiful.
Lets start off on price point. Paying $30 for a game that is 12 years old is pretty steep, but they claim to have done some work to it so I decided what the heck, I'll get it.
Bad choice. Unfortunately several important units are now broken since clearly no one bothered to test the game after they made their changes. Some missions on the campaign simply cannot be beaten without using cheats now because of broken units.
As for the changes themselves, the water does look pretty. But I probably wouldn't have even noticed changed it i hadn't already known. There is absolutely NO NEW CONTENT added, it is just a rehash. I would hope they would at least do something to the horrible path finding and unit commands but apparently they could not be bothered to do that much work.
BIG DISAPPOINTMENT
10/10 for the original game
1/10 for getting people to pay twice for the exact same thing
SummaryAge of Mythology transports players to a time when heroes did battle with monsters of legend and the gods intervened in the affairs of mortal men. Players wage war using human armies and diplomacy, progress through development ages, enhance military and economic performance with improvements, and manage economics through resource gatheri...