Despite not being overly enamoured with the original, I'm happy to report that the improvements in the medieval follow-up Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings, while not individually ground-breaking, add up to a very impressive whole. Our AoE review from late 1997 highlights the game's weaknesses, but it's also worth reading for a basic description of the game mechanics, which remain the same. In a head-to-head feature count with the contemporary Total Annihilation, AoE looked as ancient as the Roman people it portrayed. A patch pretty much fixed those problems, yet others remained - for example the interface was relatively basic, lacking any ability to set aggression levels for units, or to queue production orders. Yet at the same time AoE had a number of problems, primarily in the AI of the villagers and soldiers in the game - they failed to react to nearby events (like their friends being eaten by lions), and if asked to move from A to B would often get stuck at C (where in one case C was a single tree in the open). The basic premise of taking a few villagers, gathering resources such as food, lumber, stone and gold, building up a settlement, developing an army and crushing your foes was not new, but Ensemble managed to make it look so good that it sold incredibly well. The blend of epic historical conflict, real-time gameplay and silky presentation made it exceptionally attractive to mainstream gamers. | The original Age of Empires sold by the million.

Age of empires 1 cd year