Age of Empires Review - PC

Nintendo already had the portable strategy game market cornered with the GBA and Advance Wars series, but when they went ahead and put a stylus on the DS you knew good things were coming. Age of Empires: The Age of Kings is the latest of those good things, and while it’s a very different game from Advance Wars and ultimately not quite as addicting, it’s very good in its own right and manages to feel a lot like the PC version.

Franchise Cousins

On the PC, Age of Empires is a sweeping large-scale empire-building game that plays a lot like a faster-paced Civilization. To succeed in the portable world, things need to happen a bit faster still and on a smaller scale (smaller screens, after all). That’s what this DS release of Age of Kings attempts to deliver, and does a pretty good job of.

Through the game’s five campaigns you’ll face short missions with simple objectives and a set number of troops as well as longer missions where you must build towns and raise an army. While the first type of missions tend to be short and played on claustrophobic maps, the latter type can take hours to complete and are often played on maps that are surprisingly large. Add in map territory that is blacked out and a very close fog of war and you get a surprisingly challenging game. 

In the longer missions you’ll build one or more town centers then surround it with mills for wheat, farms for food, mines for gold, and other buildings like stables, barracks, and defensive towers. The game is turn-based, and during each turn you earn a bit of money and can research one advance like chainmail for improved defenses or wheelbarrows for increased production. When you’ve earned enough and researched enough you can advance your age, opening up new areas of research and new units to build, which you will use to advance to the next age, and so forth. It’s this progression and gradual unlocking of more advanced units that can make the game quite addicting.

Ways to Play

Those five campaigns will take a long time to complete, but once done you can play against the AI in skirmishes on any of a large number of maps. By completing missions you earn points that can be spent to unlock new maps and advanced unit types, like the Knights of the Round! You can also play multi-cart multiplayer with up to three friends, or you can play hot-seat mode with a single DS, which is a nice touch, but doesn’t work well for more than two.

The game looks quite good, with stylish tapestry displays wrapping the menus and descriptive scenes along with reasonably detailed though somewhat simply animated units. Audio isn’t quite as good; the music works well, but sound effects are awfully repetitive. Controls are mostly fine, with the stylus used for most tasks, but given the game’s isometric perspective and inability to rotate, tapping on the right unit in the crowd can be a challenge. Thankfully you can use the D-pad when in a pinch.

Good Fun and a Good Lesson

Age of Kings is a very solid and fun game, and manages to be a pretty good history lesson too. The control isn’t perfect, sometimes requiring a little more tapping than you might like, but it sure beats playing with just a D-pad. With its lengthy campaigns, replayability, and solid multiplayer, strategy fans will keep coming back to this one.