Not A Review - Age of Empires Online - PC on Astini News

A few weeks after launch, my initial judgement of Age of Empires Online holds up: This MMO take on real-time strategy is a great fit for casual and moderate RTS players, but can't compete with StarCraft II or Company of Heroes for competitive multiplayer.

The good parts of AOEO are like if you stretched out a traditional RTS single-player campaign over hundreds of hours and mixed it with the multiple progression paths of a traditional MMO like World of Warcraft. How appealing that sounds to you is an excellent indicator of whether or not AOEO is worth your money.

Most of AOEO's hundreds of scenarios fall into the same major categories we've seen in RTS for years. Defend your base, or an ally or two's bases, for a set time. Blow up the enemy base. Rescue these guys from the enemies (which is really "blow up the enemy base but you don't have to burn the whole stupid thing down"). Collect this many resources. A few fall outside the norm -- straight-up tower defense shows up, as do timed escorts and adventure-style missions, but you'll spend the majority of your time engaged in the handful of activities above.

The scenarios are executed reasonably well, for the most part. Quest progressions occasionally get stuck in a rut where you do the same thing a few times in a row, sometimes even on the same terrain, but it's more of an infrequent annoyance than a serious problem. I find myself wishing I could skip missions that involve water on a regular basis, though, since I'm pretty sure the boats in Warcraft II behaved better than AOEO's navies.

Which brings us to the two-sided nature of AOEO's core gameplay: It's like going back in time a decade. I appreciate that; the Age of Empires II/StarCraft era was a golden age of RTS. I adore the Age II-style slower pacing of AOEO as a contrast to the breakneck pace of StarCraft II. I love the simplicity of building up bases, recruiting a gigantic army, and smashing my enemies with it. That basic loop is what made me fall in love with RTS years ago, and it hasn't gotten any less fun. AOEO gives me hundreds of hours of unique (if often similar) scenarios to do that in and gain persistent rewards for doing so, and that's a fine thing.

One thing missing from AOEO that RTS players expect is a skirmish mode. This is where you (and a few friends, perhaps) take on AI-controlled enemies on a symmetrical map. Microsoft has said that it's planning on selling a beefed-up skirmish mode as a $10 content pack later, but for now the PvE game is limited to scenarios where you typically start with much less than a scripted AI player and have to build up enough to take them out. There is also a $10 DLC pack built around defending against scripted waves of enemies. I happen to like that style of RTS mission, but if such asymmetrical campaigns aren't your bag, prepare for disappointment.

Going back to the same often-problematic pathfinding and questionable-at-best AI that we dealt with back in the day can be rough. Outside of the god-awful naval mechanics, though, nothing is bad enough to be a real problem. I rarely found myself getting all that angry at my units for doing stupid things; they are regularly brain-dead, but they are not that hard to keep a leash on once you learn their quirks.

To my surprise, micromanagement skills (giving orders in the heat of battle, splitting groups to deal with different threats, clearing a path for battering rams, etc.) are as important as macro ability (managing your economy and base expansion). I thought that the high unit counts of a typical AOEO match would lead to more "grab everybody, attack-move, and have faith that your economy can reinforce faster than theirs" engagements, but that's not the case at all. Heated battles are as tense and exciting here as they are in any other good RTS.

Next up: Persistence, muddy unit design, and final thoughts