It's like having an incredible selection of toy soldiers - the kind you might get for your birthday if you were the heir to the throne of a large nation - and watching them come alive.
As a onetime British schoolkid, I already knew plenty of the stuff about King Henry and the Normans but genuinely wanted to know more about the Russian battles and Genghis Khan.Įverything is a delight to look at too, whether you're zoomed out as your huge army marches across the map, or focus in on a single worker casting their fishing net from the shore of a lake. While you can skip through any of the introductory videos, and ignore the extra ones you unlock by playing, they are a beautiful feature that makes you feel smarter just by existing. As you're playing, there's an almost ASMRish narrator giving historical context to your victory. When you're playing through the campaign missions you'll get a mix of videos, some that look like tourist board b-roll overlaid with line drawings, but that really highlight the mark that battle left on the world. Watch your back The Sims 4, I have a new stress reliever.Īge of Empires 4 takes its history seriously, but that never gets in the way of satisfying gameplay. After a few punishing defeats, I spent many a happy hour on a resource-rich map I designed for myself - with no enemies at all on it - so I could enjoy building a perfect settlement and maxing out all the tech trees. You can also create your own scenarios, tweaking everything from resources to map size to difficulty. If you want to just go wild you can choose from a bunch of scenarios in the Skirmish mode, playing against the surprisingly canny AI or other players. It can be frustrating to see your army massacred because you ignored the suggestions, but it's also a hard lesson in military common sense. There's advice but minimal hand-holding, and even in the early levels it's easy to make a bad call - wasting resources building things you really don't need, a mistake which can leave you with nothing to bolster your army with when the enemy attacks, or taking too long to launch an attack and instead, having to face the enemy unprepared as they turn up and start bashing down your walls. An overall goal, like breaching the Great Wall of China, is broken down into smaller objectives. The single-player missions work as both a gentle onboarding process for the modern military tactician and are satisfying in their own right.
Maybe you'll terrorize the local populace with endless legions of archers and swordsmen, or maybe you'll work on your defenses and focus on building a "Wonder" to prove your people's dominance.
Winning is about using all of the above as efficiently as possible depending on the enemy, the map, and its resources and landscape. You need food, gold, wood, and stone to purchase everything you need, collect or trade enough and you can advance your civilization through different historical ages, offering more advanced technology. You'll have worker townspeople at your disposal to build up settlements and collect resources, and an army - complete with specialized units and siege weaponry - to command. Control freaks, step right up because you are about to live your best life. If you're new to the series, think of it as a management sim, but one where the aim is to save your people from invaders or to crush whole nations beneath your mighty fist.
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