High-performance playtime

The easiest way to get into this classic RTS series.

Age of Empires III comes from an era of 3D games that don’t exactly beg to be remastered. It’s a game where increased resolutions serve to highlight the half-baked animations that were previously hidden among pixels. So a remaster of this is like watching historical reenactments in 4K only to find that they’re performed by animatronic soldiers. Yet while there’s not much gained in this definitive edition, not all is lost either.

Series fans will know the drill in Age of Empires III: plonk down a town centre anywhere on a map, build villagers, and scurry around extracting food, wood, and gold from the earth that you use to build armies, improve your technologies, and wipe out your enemies.

There are two all-new civs in the Definitive Edition, both with some interesting bonuses: Sweden gets cheap mercenaries and charming wooden torps (quaint little huts) that gather resources, while Inca can garrison military in many of its buildings and use priestesses to woo enemies over to your side.

You now only have three resources to worry about instead of four and you no longer need special buildings to store resources, cutting down on menial micro-management. There’s an enjoyable card system too, which lets you set up a deck between battles, then call in supplies from your home city on a timer.

The problems with Age of Empires III start when you zoom in, seeing how messy things are up close. Combat neither looks nor feels great – your own units often struggle to get around each other, pathfinding is dodgy and inflexible. For a game gloating about its updated physics engine, it’s strange that the physicality of its combat makes it seem like everyone’s wielding weapons and armour forged from monopole north-facing magnets.

Age of Empires III remains a solid skirmish-style RTS that would fare better were it not released shortly after a game that’s so clearly Microsoft’s favourite strategy baby. Where Age of Empires II received several expansions over the last decade, including an all-new one for the Definitive Edition, there are no new campaigns here beyond the base game and its two expansions released at the time. And while there are a couple of highlights in there, most notably the tale of Native American soldiers in the WarChiefs expansion, they don’t really add up.

If you care little for singleplayer campaigns and are looking for a brisk RTS to play online with friends, then this is an easy path into a stalwart series and a timelessly fun strategy formula, with plenty of touches that make it easy to acclimatise to. ROBERT ZAK

A modest remaster of a fun but flawed RTS that’s stuck in its predecessor ever-lengthening shadow.